Quoting, capacity, time capture people will actually do, and project profitability you can see while the job is still running rather than after you invoice it.
If you sell time and expertise, your margin lives in the gap between what you quoted and what you actually spent. The uncomfortable part is that most firms cannot see that gap until the job is finished and the invoice is going out — which is exactly when nothing can be done about it. Custom software for professional services firms in Australia is usually bought for that reason, not for a nicer dashboard. It is bought by a director who has just written off forty hours and wants to know, next time, on the Wednesday of week two.
By professional services we mean the businesses that resource work with people: consultancies, engineering and design practices, architects, agencies and studios, allied health clinics, and the service businesses that sit next to the trades — surveying, testing, inspection, project management. Different vocabulary, same shape. You quote a scope, you resource it, people record their time badly, and profitability is a hindsight exercise.
This is not the leftovers category. It is the one where the operational data already exists and is nearly useless, because it is split across a quoting document, a practice management tool, a timesheet system, a shared drive and someone's memory of what the client agreed to in a phone call. Firms in this position rarely need a new platform. They need the pieces joined, the manual steps removed and one honest number per job.
We build onto what you already run — Xero or MYOB, Accelo, Total Synergy, WorkflowMax, SimPRO or AroFlo, Cliniko or Halaxy, HubSpot, SharePoint — rather than replacing it. If you have not yet worked out where the money actually goes, start with business process analysis before anyone writes code. It is cheaper to find out that the problem is your scoping habit than to automate around it.
The estimate that won the work carries forward as the budget the job is measured against — hours by role, phases, assumptions, exclusions. When the client asks for something outside it, that becomes a recorded variation with a number attached, rather than a favour someone remembers at invoice time.
Most time data is bad because it is reconstructed on Friday from calendar entries and guesswork. Capture has to take seconds and happen where the work is — a phone, a job screen, a timer beside the task, sensible defaults, a prompt when a day is thin. Ten minutes of real data a day beats an hour of fiction a week.
Hours, subconsultants, disbursements and expenses booked against phases as they land, with committed cost included rather than only what has been invoiced. The point is a job that is at sixty per cent of budget and thirty per cent of scope raising its hand in week two, not being discovered at completion.
Who is committed to what, for how long, and what that leaves. A view of the next six to twelve weeks that tells you whether the proposal in front of you can actually be resourced, and whether the person you are about to promise is already spoken for. Utilisation is worth measuring, but it is a symptom — capacity is the decision.
The status update that costs an hour to prepare gets replaced by a client-facing view of progress, approvals, documents and outstanding items. This is standard client portal territory, and it removes the risk of a project living entirely inside one person's inbox until the day they resign or go on leave.
Retainer scope tracked against retainer delivery, so you can see which clients are quietly getting forty per cent more than they pay for. Renewal dates, review meetings, scheduled recalls and recurring deliverables handled by workflow automation instead of a reminder somebody set last year and has since ignored.
We sit with the people who quote, the people who deliver and the person who chases the numbers at month end. The gap between how work is meant to flow and how it actually flows is usually where the money is going.
We map the real path of a job from enquiry to final invoice, including the steps nobody documents — the pricing that gets adjusted verbally, the scope agreed on a call, the timesheet fixed on the way out. Some of what we find is a process problem, not a software problem, and we will say so.
We agree the smallest set of things that must be captured to give you a live profitability and capacity view, then design capture around the people who have to do it. Every field you add is a field somebody has to fill in, and adoption is the whole game.
We build it and connect it to your accounting, practice management and document systems so nothing is entered twice. Client data we host sits in Australian regions.
After a quarter, the data will tell you which job types consistently run over, which clients absorb unbilled time and where quoting is systematically optimistic. That is usually more valuable than the automation, and it feeds directly into how you price the next one.
Often you should not, and we will tell you if that is the case. The build is worth considering when your work does not fit the shape the product assumes — unusual phase structures, a mix of fixed fee and time and materials on one job, multi-entity reporting, or a client reporting format you are contractually stuck with. The common outcome is not replacement. It is connecting what you have and filling two or three specific gaps.
Partly design, partly management, and anyone who claims it is only design is selling something. Capture has to be faster than avoiding it — seconds, on the device already in their hand, with defaults that are usually right. Then the data has to visibly matter: people record time when they see it change resourcing and scope conversations, not when it disappears into a report they never see.
Subscription pricing, not fixed-price projects — monthly billing, a three-month minimum term, thirty days' notice to cancel. The figure depends on headcount, how many systems it connects to, and whether clients get a portal. Email outreach@drawnai.app with a short description of how your firm runs jobs and we will explain what drives the number.
That is the right question to ask, because your input is genuinely expensive. Expect a few hours a week from one or two people who understand delivery, concentrated in the first few weeks. We work around your deadlines rather than through them, and roll out one process at a time so nobody is learning a system and delivering a project at the same time.
Yes, and it should, because most firms run both and often on the same client. Fixed-fee work still needs hours recorded against it — that is the only way to know whether the fee was right. The system tracks effort and cost the same way regardless, and changes only what gets invoiced and what gets reported as margin.
Mostly the second, and it is worth being clear about that. Better capacity and profitability data makes you quote more accurately and say no earlier, which improves margin rather than volume. If the goal is genuinely more pipeline, that is a different build — sales and growth systems — and it is usually better done after your delivery data is trustworthy.
A first conversation costs nothing and usually ends with a clearer idea of what is worth building — sometimes that answer is “not yet”, and we will say so.
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