Solutions · Services & consultancies
Moving a practice on, with the work already in flight.
Clients, projects, time logs, quotations and billing for a practice or consultancy. Nobody starts on an empty book. There are jobs half done, a proposal that has been open since March, and a client file that exists entirely inside one person’s memory. So the order here is the reverse of a shop’s — the client goes in first and the work comes with them — and the thing that has to start on the first day is a habit rather than a setting.
The order it goes in
Clients first, and the work with them
A practice has almost nothing to enter and one thing that is genuinely hard. The short part is the list of clients. The long part is everything that was said.
The clients you are already working for
Not a name and a number. The client record is where everything said ends up living, so entering one is a conversation with whoever has been handling them rather than a copying exercise.
Until this is in, there is nothing for a piece of work to belong to.
The work in flight, as what is left of it
A half-done job goes in as the tasks, the deliverables and the approvals still outstanding — not as a history of what has already happened. The history that matters gets written onto the client; the work record is for what is still to do.
Until this is in, the practice is still being run out of somebody’s notebook.
One shape you have run before
The second job of a kind is the one to pause on. Turning it into a template there and then costs a few minutes; doing it once the practice has run a great many of them is an afternoon of remembering.
Optional, and the only thing on this page that pays for itself twice.
Hours, from the first day
Not because anything downstream depends on it. Because hours nobody logged in the first fortnight are simply gone, and a practice that starts logging in month three has a month three it cannot explain to itself.
This is a habit rather than a setting, and it is the only thing here that can quietly fail.
One day, and where it lands
A practice keeps two records and one habit
Set against a shop or a godown this drawing is nearly empty, and that is the finding rather than a gap. A practice’s filing system is small; what makes it work is that everything lands in it on the day it happens.
What makes it work is not on the drawing at all: somebody logging the hour on the day they worked it, and writing the follow-up down while the call is still in their ear.
What we would leave switched off
The parts that get demonstrated first are the ones you will never open
A practice sells hours and answers. The shelf and the godown are not a smaller part of this business — they are not part of it at all.
- Catalogue
- There is no shelf. No item list to keep, no unit to settle, and no price that has to be right on a thing before anybody can be billed for it.
- Stock & warehouses
- Nothing is held anywhere. No godown, no movement to write down, and no figure anybody has to be able to stand behind at the end of a month.
That is a great deal of what a business system is usually shown as, switched off — and the practice’s screens are shorter for it every day, not only on the day it was set up.
The part that does not come across
The file in somebody’s head
Everything else about moving a practice on is typing. This is not, and pretending otherwise is how a system ends up half used.
The clients come across. The work in flight can be entered in an afternoon as what is left of it. What does not come across is why the March proposal was never chased, what the client actually meant in the second meeting, and which of your people that client will and will not speak to.
There is no honest trick for that. What there is: from the day it is switched on, every call, meeting, site visit and follow-up lands on the client rather than in the person who made it. So the file stops being a person after the first month, and the handover you are quietly worried about stops being a conversation somebody has to schedule.
Which is why we would rather see a practice enter a few clients properly than all of them as names.
What a practice asks first
Three questions a shop never has to ask
They are all versions of the same worry — that the part of the business that matters is the part nobody can type in.
- Our enquiries live in a spreadsheet. Do we retype them?
- No — they can be brought in from a Google Sheet, which is where most practices keep them. What arrives is a lead with somewhere for its calls, meetings and follow-ups to go, rather than a line in a file nobody has updated since February.
- What about the work we do that nobody is paying for yet?
- It belongs on the client, not on an invented job. A proposal that has been open since March is a conversation with its own follow-ups and its own tasks — visible, chaseable, and already attached to the customer it is going to become.
- Our people work out of the client’s office. Does anything have to happen in ours?
- No. Attendance can be marked as a location check-in from wherever the work is, on shifts you set, with week-offs, holidays and leave requests on the same staff register the salary side works from.
What your website is allowed to see
A practice’s site has one job, and should be given exactly one thing
Each kind of record is switched on or off on its own, on a key you issue and tied to the branch you issue it for. For a practice the honest answer is that almost all of it should be switched off.
What you would open
- Your forms — an enquiry filled in on your site arrives in your forms inbox as an answer to be worked. Not an email somebody has to remember to file.
What stays shut
- Your clients — the site never needs to read who you work for. Publishing that is a decision you make on purpose, not a connection you leave open.
- Your work and your bills — nothing about a live job or an unpaid invoice is reachable from a public page.
A practice’s website is not a shopfront and should not be wired like one. Giving it the one thing it needs is not a smaller version of what a shop gets — it is the correct answer for this business.
Tell us what is open.
The jobs in flight, the proposals nobody has chased, and who is currently holding the file. We will say what we would switch on for the first month and what we would leave alone — and we would far rather you tried it on one live job than on a demonstration.
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