ABC for consulting firms, agencies and professional services

Performa’s Professional services template is designed for management consulting practices, creative and marketing agencies, engineering & design, advisory boutiques, structured law firms. Anywhere people’s time is the dominant cost and there is neither BOM nor machinery.

The problem it solves

In professional services, the main cost line is staff. Not a pool of fungible workers, but professionals with very different hourly costs (junior, senior, partner) working on multiple projects in parallel. The classic question “what did project X really cost us?” has no answer without a serious ABC model.

Typical complications:

The senior consultant partly acts as project manager on their own engagement and partly as mentor to juniors — but their time on “mentorship activities” is non-billable and needs to be allocated elsewhere.
The office, connectivity, software licenses, admin — all indirect costs that need to flow onto projects, but by what criterion?
The partner spends 30% of their time on BD (business development) — that cost is not tied to a specific project, but it is indispensable for future ones.
Some projects have direct out-of-pocket costs (travel, subcontractors, permits) that need to be tracked per project without mixing into overhead.

What the template ships with

The Professional services template arrives pre-configured with:

Staff: employee entity with grade (junior/senior/partner), fully loaded cost (salary + benefits + amortized workstation cost), availability in hours/year.
Detailed timesheet: employee × project × activity matrix (billable / mentorship / BD / training / admin). Each cell becomes an allocation rule.
Billable activities: analysis, design, development, site management, delivery, review. Split by phase and by project type.
Non-billable activities: BD, internal training, admin, internal R&D. Allocated onto “structure” or long-term cost objects (commercial pipeline).
Cost objects: individual projects or clients (your choice), with volumes (estimated hours), revenue (billed) and calculated cost-to-serve.

Typical insights that emerge

From real models built on Performa in professional practices:

“Small but numerous” engagements cost more than large strategic ones. Every small engagement has a fixed opening cost (kick-off, scoping, order, invoicing, closure) almost independent of value. Below a threshold — often €5-8k — small engagements destroy value.
A senior’s real hourly cost is twice the nominal one. Because 40% of their time goes to non-billable activities (mentoring, BD, internal reviews). Anyone billing “€150/hour” on the senior is losing money unless they bill at least 60% of productive time.
Some clients are loss-making even at standard rates. Because they require more revisions, more alignment calls, more extra deliverables than “easier” clients. Differentiated cost-to-serve per client explains why the practice isn’t growing even though revenue is up.
Internal training is an investment, not a cost. But if you don’t isolate it as a long-term cost object, it looks like “unproductive time” that depresses apparent margin.

Who buys it, typically

Management consulting practices that want to know which engagements to open and which to walk away from, creative agencies bleeding money on legacy clients without knowing which ones, engineering & design firms deciding whether to invest in a new service line, law-firm partners looking to modernize partner compensation.

Want to see the Professional services template applied to your practice? Write to us. If you’d rather start with the product: explore Performa.