Analytics
Utilization and project economics from real logged work
SyncHQ for consultancies
In a consultancy the product is billable hours, which makes utilization and realization the only two numbers that matter - and most firms can only calculate them a month late.
The week this is about
You sell people's time, so the entire business reduces to two ratios: how much of your team's available time is billable, and how much of that billable time actually reaches an invoice. Almost every consultancy can tell you the first, roughly, a month after the fact. Very few can tell you the second at all.
The gap between the two is where the money goes. Hours are logged, then discounted at invoicing because a partner feels the client will push back. Work is delivered in week one and invoiced in week six. An engagement drifts past its agreed scope and the extra advisory time is written off as relationship investment.
None of these are visible as decisions. They are a hundred small write-offs, and the only symptom is that revenue never quite matches how busy everyone was.
What changes
01
Utilization computed, not assembled
When time, projects, and billing read from the same data, utilization is a number the system already knows rather than a monthly exercise in reconciliation. The value of that is not the metric - it is that it is current enough to act on.
02
The gap between delivered and invoiced stays small
Work in progress - delivered but unbilled - is one of the earliest signals of a cash-flow problem, usually by a month or two. Invoicing generated from tracked time shortens that gap structurally rather than through discipline.
03
Engagement scope has a boundary that is written down
Advisory scope drifts more easily than production scope, because "a quick call about something adjacent" does not feel like a deliverable. A written scope with exclusions gives the boundary an artefact, which is the only thing that makes it enforceable without it becoming personal.
When this is the wrong tool
If you bill exclusively on fixed-fee outcomes and genuinely do not track hours, the metrics this is built around will not tell you much. Your unit of profitability is the engagement, not the hour.
Questions from consultancies
Is this a PSA tool?
It covers a lot of the same ground - delivery, time, billing, and profitability reading from one dataset - but a full PSA like Productive or Kantata goes considerably deeper on resource forecasting and financial modelling. If resourcing across a large bench is your bottleneck, they are the stronger answer, and our comparison pages say so plainly.
Can we track utilization by role?
Yes. Capacity and workload are tracked per person and per role, which matters because available hours differ substantially by seniority - a partner with business-development responsibility does not have the same available hours as an analyst.
Run one real client through it
Three projects and five people on the free plan - enough to take a live client from intake to invoice before you decide anything.
Not quite you?