“Are my associates making me money or costing me?”

Worth checking, because it’s a surprisingly common place to be losing money without noticing.

An associate who costs more than they return on a given engagement won’t show up anywhere in your accounts, because their fee lands in cost of sales and their revenue lands in turnover, and nobody puts the two side by side. Do it per supplier and per project and the picture is often uncomfortable.

Once you can see it, you can renegotiate the rate, bring the work inside, or stop using them.

“What is all my non-billable time actually doing?”

Analyse it properly and a chunk of it usually turns out to be administrative work being done by expensive people.

Internal support tasks, report formatting, scheduling, chasing information. None of it needs a fee earner. Moving that work to admin staff lifts occupancy across the team without hiring another consultant, which is the cheapest capacity you will ever buy.

“Which of my consultants are actually profitable?”

Occupancy and profitability per fee earner are two different questions, and the answers often disagree.

Someone can be fully booked and still unprofitable if their rate is wrong or their work consistently overruns. Reporting both together tells you whether you have a utilisation problem, a pricing problem, or a delivery problem. They need completely different fixes.

“Which projects are actually profitable?”

Your biggest client is often not your best one.

Cost at project level, including associate margin and the unbilled overrun nobody wants to own up to, and a handful of engagements usually turn out to be subsidised by the rest. That changes how you price the next proposal, and sometimes whether you bid at all.

“Where has my cash gone?”

Into the gap between doing the work and being paid for it.

Work delivered in March, invoiced in May, paid in July is four months of payroll funded out of your own pocket. Unbilled work in progress plus debtor days is the number to watch, and it needs watching weekly rather than annually.

“Can I afford to hire?”

That depends on your pipeline, not your last three months of revenue.

Unsold capacity is the most expensive thing in a consultancy and the least visible. Forecasting it against a weighted pipeline lets you hire ahead of demand instead of scrambling behind it.