For professional services firms, profitability depends on more than delivering great work. It relies on knowing how each project is performing, how much time has been spent, what costs need to be recovered and whether billing is happening quickly and accurately.
The challenge is that many firms still manage this information across disconnected systems. Finance data may sit in one place, project information in another, while timesheets, expenses and billing are handled through separate tools or spreadsheets. This makes it difficult to answer a simple but critical question: are our projects actually profitable?
Sage Intacct helps professional services firms solve this by bringing project, financial, time, expense and billing data together in one connected cloud finance platform. With real-time visibility and automation, firms can reduce manual work, improve billing accuracy and make better decisions across the business.
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Explore how connected project finance, automated billing and real-time reporting can help firms improve profitability and reduce manual admin.
The challenge of disconnected systems
When project and financial data are not connected, profitability becomes harder to track. A project may appear to be going well, but hidden issues can quickly reduce margin. Billable hours may be missed, expenses may not be recharged, supplier costs may not be allocated correctly or invoices may be delayed.
These issues can directly affect cash flow and profitability. Project managers may not have a real-time view of performance, while finance teams spend valuable time gathering information from different systems. This creates slow reporting, admin-heavy invoicing and limited visibility over employee utilisation.
For professional services firms, these problems are not just operational frustrations. They can lead to revenue leakage, poor decision-making and reduced control as the business grows.
A connected platform for project finance
Sage Intacct provides a unified platform for managing the full project lifecycle, from setup and cost capture through to billing and reporting. Instead of relying on disconnected processes, teams can work from a single source of truth.
Finance teams, project managers and leadership can access the same live data, including billed and unbilled hours, project costs, revenue, budgets and profitability. With drill-down reporting, users can also trace figures back to the original transactions, helping them understand what is driving performance.
Sage Intacct can also integrate with existing systems, including CRM and PSA tools, through its OpenAPI. This allows firms to connect their wider business systems while keeping finance at the centre of project performance.
Flexible project management
Different projects need different levels of control. Sage Intacct supports this with flexible project setup options.
For simpler requirements, projects can be used as tags on general ledger transactions, allowing firms to track revenue and costs for basic profit and loss reporting. For more complex needs, Sage Intacct’s full project module provides deeper management across billing models, resources, tasks, estimates and budgets.
This is useful for firms managing a mix of project types, such as time and materials work, fixed-fee engagements and projects with additional recharges. Sage Intacct also supports cost-plus markups, helping firms automatically apply agreed percentages to project costs or supplier invoices.
Capturing more billable time and cost
One of the biggest risks for professional services firms is missed billable activity. Small amounts of unrecorded time, unrecharged expenses or forgotten supplier costs can add up quickly.
Sage Intacct helps reduce this risk by connecting time, expenses and AP invoices directly to projects. Employees can submit timesheets and expenses, while mobile apps make it easier to capture information on the go. Sage Intacct can also integrate with expense partners such as Webexpenses and Expensify.
Sage Intelligent Time adds another layer of automation by helping populate timesheets from calendar, email and desktop activity. This helps consultants and project teams capture more billable hours and reduce the risk of time being forgotten.
Billable AP invoices can also be flagged against a project and automatically pulled into the customer invoice. This helps ensure client-rechargeable costs are not missed.
Faster, more accurate billing
Billing can be one of the most time-consuming processes for professional services firms, especially when teams need to bring together time, expenses and project costs from multiple places.
Sage Intacct uses billing templates to automate invoice creation for different billing models, including time and materials, fixed-fee and cost-plus projects. The system pulls together unbilled time, expenses and billable AP invoices for review before posting as a draft or final invoice.
This helps finance teams reduce manual effort, improve accuracy and invoice clients more quickly. Faster billing also supports better cash flow, which is especially important for growing firms.
Real-time reporting and utilisation insight
Sage Intacct gives professional services firms access to dashboards and reports that support better decision-making.
Project manager dashboards can show key performance indicators such as hours worked, costs, revenue and potential billings. Firms can also compare actuals against budget and review project-by-project performance.
Utilisation reporting helps track total hours, utilised hours and billable hours across the business. This gives leadership teams better insight into capacity, resourcing and whether teams are being over- or under-serviced.
A scalable solution for growing firms
Sage Intacct is modular, which means firms can start with the functionality they need today and add more as they grow. A business might begin with basic project tracking, then introduce timesheets, expenses, automated billing and deeper resource management over time.
For professional services firms moving beyond entry-level finance systems, this provides a strong foundation for growth. Sage Intacct helps bring finance and operations together, giving firms greater visibility, better control and more confidence in their project profitability..
