Accounting for professional service firms
For firms whose product is time — attorneys, agencies, consultancies, and the people who run them.
When you sell expertise, your inventory is hours. That sounds simple until you try to find those hours in a financial statement, where they show up as payroll on one side and revenue on the other with nothing connecting them.
The result is a familiar frustration: the firm is busy, everyone's working, and the profit still isn't what it should be. Usually the answer isn't a rate problem. It's that some work takes far longer than it was priced for, and nothing in the monthly reporting surfaces which work that is.
We set books up so the connection is visible — what came in, what it cost to deliver, and what's still sitting unbilled.
The real issue
Busy and profitable aren't the same thing
Most service firms have a handful of clients or engagement types quietly running at a loss. They're usually the ones people complain about but nobody measures. Once the numbers are visible, the decision tends to make itself.
The other recurring issue is owner compensation. In a firm where the owners also do the work, the line between salary, draw, and profit gets blurry — and that blurriness has real tax consequences. It's worth being deliberate about.
What we handle
- Bookkeeping and monthly reporting built around how you bill
- Payroll for staff, and owner compensation set up sensibly
- Visibility into unbilled work and collections
- Year-round tax planning for owners and partners
- Cash-flow forecasting through uneven collection cycles
- Fractional CFO support when the firm outgrows spreadsheets
FAQ
Questions we hear
Usually. Most systems export what we need. We'd rather adapt to a system your team already uses than force a migration that costs you weeks.
It depends on your entity, income level, and plans — and it's genuinely worth getting right, because the difference compounds annually. We'll walk through the options for your specific setup rather than apply a rule of thumb.
Usually when the questions turn from "what happened" to "what should we do" — hiring, pricing, whether to take the space. That's the point where CFO-level input starts paying for itself.
Find out what your hours actually earn
Book a consultation and we'll talk about getting real visibility into firm profitability.