Built for firms that sell their people’s time
The mechanics are the same whether you call them projects, engagements, matters or jobs: someone records time, someone approves it, and someone has to know whether it made money.
Same problem, different vocabulary
Every one of these firms hit the same wall: the spreadsheet that tracks the fee stopped agreeing with the system that tracks the time.
Engineering and architecture
Long jobs, phased fees, endless variations
Hold a fee per phase, track variations separately from the base appointment, and see recoverability across a project that runs for three years.
- Phase and work-package budgets
- Variation tracking
- Site time from a phone
Management and technical consulting
Utilisation is the business model
When margin is the gap between cost rate and charge-out rate, both need to be current. The Ledger keeps them effective-dated and reports on the spread continuously.
- Utilisation by grade and team
- Blended-rate analysis
- Pipeline against capacity
Design studios and agencies
Retainers that stop leaking
Retainer clients quietly absorb far more time than they are billed for. Set a monthly allowance, watch it burn down, and have the conversation before the overage becomes a write-off.
- Monthly retainer burn-down
- Scope-creep alerts
- Client-facing time summaries
Accounting and advisory
Work in progress you can defend
Every hour carries its narrative, its rate and its approval. When a client queries the bill, the answer is two clicks away rather than an afternoon of archaeology.
- WIP ageing and provisions
- Write-on and write-off history
- Per-engagement profitability
Legal and professional practices
Matters, rates and matter-level margin
Client-specific rate agreements, matter budgets and locked periods once time is billed — with a full audit trail behind every change.
- Client rate agreements
- Matter budgets
- Locked billed periods
In-house delivery teams
Internal cost, recharged properly
Not every timesheet ends in an invoice. Recharge internal teams to the business units they serve, using the same rates and the same approvals.
- Cost-centre recharge
- Capitalisable time
- Project portfolio reporting
Four people, four questions
A good system answers all of them from the same set of hours — without anyone rebuilding a report to do it.
Managing partners and directors
“Which of our clients are actually profitable?”
A firm-level view of utilisation, realisation and margin, with the ability to drop into a single project without asking anyone to prepare a pack.
- Live margin by client and project
- Quarter-on-quarter trends
- Board-ready exports
Project managers
“Are we going to run over on this one?”
Budget burn on every project you lead, an approval queue for your team, and an alert when a job crosses the threshold you set rather than after the fact.
- Budget burn and forecast overrun
- One approval queue per manager
- Team capacity for the next six weeks
Everyone billing time
“How long is this going to take me?”
About ninety seconds a week. The grid remembers your projects, fills from last week, and tells you when your hours add up.
- Weekly grid with keyboard entry
- Works on a phone
- Notes that carry through to billing
Operations and finance
“Can I close the month without chasing?”
Automated reminders, period locking, WIP ageing and a billing run that starts from data that has already been approved.
- Automated submission reminders
- Period locking once billed
- Exports into your finance system
“We run eleven live projects across two offices and three currencies. Before The Ledger, working out where we stood took a week and was wrong by the time we finished. Now it is a page.”
Tom Brennan · Operations Director, Arbor Studio · 46 people
- 3 weeks
- from sign-up to running the whole firm on it
- £310k
- of previously unbilled work recovered in year one
- 0
- spreadsheets still involved in the month-end close
Moving off what you have now
Most firms arrive from a timesheet tool that never did budgets, or a spreadsheet that did everything badly. Either way you do not need a clean break: run The Ledger alongside for a month, then stop maintaining the old one.
- Import people, clients and projects from CSV
- Bring historic time in with its original rates intact
- Run in parallel for a period and reconcile before you commit
- Guided onboarding included on every plan
- Day 1
Organisation and people
Create the organisation, invite the team, define grades and rates.
- Day 2
Clients and live projects
Import your client list and set budgets on the jobs currently running.
- Week 1
First full week recorded
Everyone logs time, managers approve, the reporting starts filling in.
- Week 4
First billing run
Draft invoices straight from approved time, reconciled against your old process.
Find out where your firm actually stands
Fourteen days, your own projects, your own people. If it does not tell you something you did not know, walk away.