Professional Services
FP&A Software for Professional Services
Connect utilization targets, project revenue, and hiring plans so your firm grows without surprises.
Your People Are Your Product — Plan Like It
In professional services, your people are your product. Planning accurately means understanding utilization rates, project profitability, and hiring timing down to the individual level. Spreadsheets can't model the interplay between capacity, revenue, and compensation.
Centage gives managing partners and CFOs a platform that connects headcount planning to revenue forecasting, so every hiring decision is backed by real financial impact analysis.
Industry Challenges
Project-Based Revenue
Revenue recognition across long engagements requires careful tracking of milestones, retainers, and deliverables.
Utilization Planning
Billable vs. non-billable time management directly impacts profitability and requires constant attention.
Multi-Office Budgeting
Different offices with different economics, cost structures, and market dynamics complicate firm-wide planning.
Hiring and Capacity
Balancing growth with utilization means timing new hires precisely to avoid both understaffing and bench time.
Compensation Complexity
Bonus pools, partner distributions, and performance-based compensation create layered modeling challenges.
Practice Profitability
Understanding margins by practice area requires granular cost allocation and revenue attribution.
How Centage Helps
Purpose-built tools that address the unique financial planning needs of professional services firms.
Project-Based Budgeting
Budget revenue and expenses by project with profitability tracking at every level. Centage lets you model retainers, milestone billing, and T&M engagements with full visibility into project economics.
Utilization Forecasting
Plan billable hours and utilization targets by role, level, and office. Model the impact of training, PTO, and business development on firm-wide utilization rates.
Multi-Office Consolidation
Roll up across offices while maintaining local P&Ls. Each office can plan independently with its own rate cards and cost structures, while leadership gets a consolidated view.
Hiring Ramp Scenarios
Model hiring timing and its impact on capacity and utilization. See how adding junior vs. senior consultants affects your blended rate, margins, and bench cost.
Compensation Planning
Plan bonuses, raises, and partner distributions with formula-driven models. Tie compensation to performance metrics and model different payout scenarios.
Practice Area Reporting
Segment reporting by practice, client, or project type. Understand which practice areas drive the most margin and where to invest for growth.
Real-World Scenario
The Challenge
A 200-person consulting firm needs to model hiring 30 new consultants across 3 offices while maintaining 75% utilization targets—without overloading any single office or practice area.
The Centage Solution
The finance team builds hiring ramp scenarios by office and level, tying each new hire to expected utilization curves and billing rates. Centage models the revenue ramp-up and bench cost for each scenario.
The Outcome
Partners can see exactly when each office reaches optimal utilization, how the hiring plan affects margins by quarter, and the break-even timeline for each cohort of new hires.
Professional Services Industry FAQs
Yes. You can set utilization targets by role, level, and office. Centage tracks planned vs. actual utilization and shows the revenue impact of utilization changes across the firm.
You can budget revenue and costs at the project level, including staff assignments, billing rates, and expense estimates. Projects roll up to practice areas and offices for consolidated reporting.
Absolutely. Centage supports role-based access so practice leaders can view their own P&L, submit forecasts, and track performance against budget—all within defined guardrails.
Yes. You can model bonus pools tied to firm, practice, or individual performance metrics. Centage calculates distributions based on your formulas and shows the impact on cash flow and margins.
Each office maintains its own budget with local rate cards and cost structures. Centage automatically consolidates all offices into a firm-wide view with inter-office eliminations as needed.
Ready to Ditch the Spreadsheets?
Join 500+ finance teams who have modernized their planning. Implement in just 4–6 weeks and start driving strategic decisions.
4-6 week implementation • Onshore support