Built for boutique consulting firms juggling six retained clients and a pipeline of one-off projects. Track utilisation by consultant, store every MSA and SOW where the deal lives, and stop chasing invoices from 12 different spreadsheets.
Generic CRMs force every deal into a single funnel. Consultancies need two: a retainer pipeline (renewals, scope expansions, monthly check-ins) and a project pipeline (proposal, kickoff, delivery, close-out). Forcing both through one funnel buries renewals behind one-off proposals.
The MSA is in legal's shared drive from 2023. The SOW is in an email thread. The signed amendment is on someone's desktop. When you sit down with a client, you cannot answer "what did we sign?" in under five minutes.
Senior partners eyeball who has bandwidth based on Slack noise. Junior consultants get double-booked. Utilisation goals slip below 65%. By the time you notice the gap, the quarter is over and the forecast is wrong.
Monthly retainers slip to net-60. One client has not paid in three months because no one remembered to send the invoice on the 1st. Cash flow disappears into a black hole between Xero and inboxes.
Set up a Retainers pipeline (Active, Renewal due, At risk, Lost) alongside a Projects pipeline (Discovery, Proposal sent, SOW signed, Delivery, Closed). Each deal carries its own value, billing cadence, and lead consultant. Weighted forecasting rolls both into one revenue view — so you know what is on the books versus what is in the air.
Upload the MSA once. Generate SOWs from a template with merge fields for scope, timeline, and fees. Every signed document attaches to the client account and the related deal — no more digging through email when the partner asks "what did we agree to in October?" Audit trail shows who signed what, when, and from which IP.
Tag every deal with a lead consultant custom field. The activity dashboard shows hours forecast per person across the next 30, 60, and 90 days. When Sarah hits 85% utilisation, the bench-availability view lights up — you know to staff the next project differently before it lands.
Set a recurring workflow: on the 1st of every month, every active retainer deal triggers a task assigned to the partner with the invoice template pre-attached. Overdue invoices auto-escalate after 14, 30, and 45 days. No more "did we bill ClientCo last month?" — the system already knows.