Business Central for Professional Services
Your project profitability is a guess until month-end. Your timesheets live in a separate system from your accounts, your WIP calculations are manual and your utilisation data is weeks out of date. Business Central provides the project accounting, resource management and financial controls that consultancies, agencies and advisory firms need to protect margins and scale profitably, with a 37% average month-end reduction across our professional services clients.
Every project, every task, every pound accounted for
Your project managers cannot see whether an engagement is profitable until the finance team compiles the numbers manually. Your timesheets, expenses and purchase invoices sit in different systems, making real-time margin visibility impossible. Business Central's Projects module provides a hierarchical project structure with projects, project tasks and project planning lines, bringing everything into one place so profitability is visible at any point, not just at month-end.
Each job task can be configured with its own budget lines covering time, expenses and purchased services. As costs are incurred, whether through time entries, purchase invoices or expense claims, they are posted against the relevant job task. This creates the real-time view of project profitability that your project managers and finance team currently lack.
Budget versus actual reporting is available at every level of the hierarchy. Project managers can see exactly where a project stands against its original scope, how much budget remains and whether the project is tracking towards the expected margin. This visibility is critical for professional services firms where project overruns directly erode profitability.
Project Hierarchy
Projects, project tasks and planning lines create a flexible structure that maps to how your firm organises engagements. Use tasks for phases, workstreams or deliverables, with detailed planning lines for resource allocation and budgeting.
Billing Models
Business Central supports fixed-fee, time and materials, retainer and milestone-based billing. Each project task can use a different billing method within the same engagement, reflecting the commercial reality of complex advisory work.
Time Entry
Consultants record time against job tasks using the time sheet functionality. Entries flow through approval workflows before being posted to the job ledger, ensuring that billable time is captured accurately and approved promptly.
Expense Management
Project-related expenses are posted directly to job tasks from purchase invoices or general journal entries. This ensures that all costs associated with a project are captured in one place, regardless of their source.
Automated WIP calculations that satisfy auditors
Work in Progress (WIP) calculation is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone processes in professional services accounting. Many firms still calculate WIP manually in spreadsheets, a process that is slow, inconsistent and difficult to audit. Business Central automates WIP using recognised accounting methods.
The system supports multiple WIP methods including cost value, sales value, percentage of completion, completed contract and cost of sales. Each method can be applied at the job level, and different projects within the same firm can use different methods depending on the contract structure.
At period end, the WIP calculation runs across all active jobs and generates the journal entries to recognise revenue and costs in accordance with the selected method. The calculation is consistent, repeatable and fully auditable. Auditors can trace every WIP entry back to the underlying time and cost entries that support it.
WIP Methods in Business Central
| Method | Best Used When |
|---|---|
| Cost Value | Revenue recognition is based on costs incurred as a percentage of total estimated costs |
| Sales Value | Revenue is recognised based on billable amounts as a proportion of total estimated sales |
| Percentage of Completion | Large, long-term contracts where progress can be measured reliably |
| Completed Contract | Revenue should only be recognised when the project is fully complete |
| Cost of Sales | Costs are recognised in the period incurred, revenue recognised on invoicing |
Utilisation tracking and capacity planning
Utilisation rate is the most important operational metric in professional services. It measures the percentage of available time that your consultants spend on billable work. Most firms know instinctively that their utilisation could be higher, but without accurate data they cannot identify the causes or measure improvements.
Business Central captures time entries against jobs and non-billable activities. When combined with resource capacity data, this provides the raw data for utilisation analysis at individual, team, department and firm level. Power BI dashboards built on this data provide real-time visibility into utilisation trends.
Resource planning uses the same data to forecast future capacity requirements. By looking at the resource requirements of committed projects and comparing them against available capacity, managers can identify resourcing gaps before they become delivery problems. This is particularly valuable for firms that need to balance project staffing against business development and internal initiatives.
Common Challenge
"We do not know our real utilisation rate until we manually compile the data at quarter end." Business Central captures time against jobs in real time, enabling utilisation analysis at any point during the period when combined with Power BI.
Common Challenge
"We overcommit resources and then struggle to deliver." Resource planning in Business Central shows committed capacity against available capacity, highlighting conflicts before they impact delivery timelines.
Practice-level financial visibility
Professional services firms need financial reporting that goes beyond standard profit and loss statements. You need to see profitability by project, by client, by practice area and by individual. Business Central's dimension functionality enables this multi-dimensional analysis without creating complex chart of accounts structures.
Dimensions such as practice area, client, engagement manager and project type can be applied to every transaction. Financial reports can then be sliced by any combination of these dimensions to produce the specific management information your leadership team requires. Astral Reports, our financial reporting extension, provides additional template-based reporting capabilities that simplify period-end reporting.
Cash flow forecasting in Business Central considers outstanding invoices, scheduled project billing, committed costs and recurring overheads to produce forward-looking cash projections. For professional services firms where cash collection can be unpredictable, this visibility is essential for financial planning.
Further Configuration for Professional Services
For practice managers and finance directors who want to understand the platform in more detail.
Job templates in Business Central allow you to define standard project structures that can be replicated for new engagements. A consulting firm might have templates for due diligence projects, transformation programmes and retainer arrangements, each with pre-defined task structures, budget lines and billing configurations. This ensures consistency across the practice and reduces setup time for new projects.
Job journal templates control how time and costs are posted, with different templates for different transaction types. Approval workflows can be configured to require manager sign-off before time entries or expenses are posted to a job, providing an additional control layer for high-value engagements.
The WIP calculation in Business Central runs at the job level and considers all posted costs and invoiced amounts to date. For the percentage of completion method, the system calculates the completion percentage based on costs incurred as a proportion of total estimated costs. It then applies this percentage to total estimated revenue to determine the revenue that should be recognised.
The WIP posting generates general ledger entries to accounts specified in the job posting group setup. These entries create the balance sheet recognition of WIP assets and accrued revenue, with corresponding entries to the income statement. The WIP can be reversed and recalculated at any time, and the complete calculation history is retained for audit purposes.
Professional services firms with international operations need project accounting that works across borders without losing visibility. Tres Tria deploys a standardised Business Central configuration across territories with local adaptations, coordinating the entire multi-territory rollout from a single project management structure.
Key capabilities for international professional services include:
- Multi-currency project billing – invoice clients in their local currency while maintaining your reporting currency for financial statements, with exchange rate management capturing currency gains and losses across the life of long-term projects
- International expense management – project expenses incurred in multiple currencies are captured, converted and posted against the correct job task regardless of the territory in which they were incurred
- Cross-entity resource sharing – intercompany transactions handle situations where consultants from one entity work on projects owned by another, with transfer pricing rules ensuring costs are allocated appropriately
- Global timesheet consolidation – time entries from consultants across all territories flow into a unified utilisation and project profitability view, enabling firm-wide resource planning and capacity analysis
Our Enterprise tier, starting at £50,000, is specifically designed for international professional services firms with multi-entity requirements.
Why professional services firms choose Tres Tria
We understand professional services because we are a professional services firm ourselves. We live with the same challenges around project profitability, utilisation and WIP management. This gives us practical insight into what works and what does not when configuring Business Central for advisory and consulting businesses.
- Professional services discovery workshops covering project structures, billing models and WIP methodology
- Pre-built job templates for common engagement types
- WIP configuration aligned to your firm's revenue recognition policy
- Power BI utilisation dashboards configured during implementation
- Astral 365 extensions on Microsoft AppSource for recurring billing, payments and reporting
- Published starting price of £25,000 for Essentials implementations
- Support Minutes model with small changes potentially live within an hour
"The WIP calculation that used to take our finance team three days at month end now runs in minutes. The auditors were impressed with the consistency and traceability of the output."
"For the first time, we can see utilisation at individual and team level in real time. It has changed how we plan resource allocation and how we have conversations about capacity."
Ready to Improve Project Profitability?
Speak with a Business Central specialist who understands professional services. We will show you how the platform handles project accounting, WIP and utilisation for firms like yours.