How we connected a fire engineering consultancy’s project system to a single reporting model, then kept improving it month after month.
The challenge
Our client is a UK fire engineering and consulting firm that works with developers, architects and building owners across several offices and regions. Like most professional services businesses, its income depends on three things: winning the right work, delivering it profitably, and keeping its people busy on billable projects.
All of the information leadership needed already existed. Fees, budgets, timesheets, invoices, supplier bills and project stages all lived in the firm’s professional services automation (PSA) system. The difficulty was getting it out in a form people could use.
Questions that should have taken seconds took days of spreadsheet work. How much revenue are we likely to book next quarter? Which projects are quietly losing money? Are we ahead or behind target in each office? Who has not submitted their timesheet? Different people could also arrive at different answers to the same question, depending on which export they started from.
What we built
We connected directly to the PSA system and built a single, governed data model on top of it. Every report is a live view of that one model, so a number means the same thing wherever it appears. There are no copies to reconcile and no private versions of the truth.
On top of the model we built six reports, each aimed at a different leadership question.
Business and Business KPIs
The leadership view. Revenue is tracked against budget by office, alongside bids issued, work won, cash collected and utilisation, with year on year comparison. A revenue projection lets leaders switch between weighted and unweighted pipeline, and between revenue with or without external costs, to see the range of likely outcomes rather than one number.
Sales
A full view of the pipeline from prospect to proposal, competitive process, contract negotiation and active project. It shows win and loss rates, conversion ratios, how long opportunities sit at each stage, the top clients and sectors by work won, and a book to burn view that compares work secured with work delivered.
Projects
The delivery view, with fee against budget, cost, profit and margin for every project and stage. Project managers can see the largest projects, the five most and least profitable, a Gantt chart of the work breakdown, invoices and supplier bills, resourced hours against actual hours, and the transactions behind every figure.
Clients
Fees, charges, recovery and profit margin by client, so leadership can see which relationships are worth the most and which are costing more than they return.
People
Headcount and joiners and leavers, utilisation by office, team and individual, leave, non-billable time, and timesheet compliance, including missing and unapproved timesheets. Team leaders get their own page so they can manage their people without waiting for a report from someone else.
Every report answers one leadership question, and every figure traces back to the same source.
Keeping it right
A report is only as good as the data behind it. We added a dedicated data quality page that flags project stages with missing or inconsistent set up, and shows the number of issues by project manager and office. Problems are fixed at the source, in the PSA system, by the people who own them, instead of being worked around in a spreadsheet.
We also built an unmapped revenue view, so any income not yet assigned to a project or stage is visible and not silently left out of the forecast.
Continuous improvement
This was never a one-off build. We run the reporting as a managed service, and the reports have been refined continuously as the firm’s questions have changed. Examples include:
- Revenue and non-billable time pages rebuilt as second versions once leadership knew what they really needed to see.
- Live forecast measures added alongside the standard ones, so the current position is always one click away.
- New switches for currency, weighted pipeline, monthly or cumulative views, and standard or actual cost, added as new questions came up.
- Detail and tooltip pages added so users can go from a headline number to the transactions behind it without leaving the report.
- A year end reporting page showing revenue and forecast by client and sector.
Because everything sits on one model, each improvement benefits every report at once. A new measure built for the leadership view is available to the project and people reports the same day.
The result
Leadership now has one trusted place to see the whole business, from the first bid to the final invoice. Office heads can see their own targets, project managers can see the health of their own projects, and team leaders can see their own people, all from the same figures. The time once spent assembling numbers is now spent acting on them.
Why it worked
- A direct connection to the PSA system. The data is read at the source, so there is no manual export to maintain.
- One governed model. Six reports, one set of definitions.
- Reports built around leadership questions, not around the data structure.
- A managed service, not a hand over. We maintain and improve the reporting every month, so it keeps pace with the business.
