Operations

How the work gets run, and what has to be true for it to survive delegation.

Guide

Agency Operations: How to Manage Clients, Delivery, Team Costs and Margins

The operating chain an agency runs on, where it usually breaks, and what to fix in which order.

Read the guide

Guide

A Practical Guide to Managing Client Work Across a Growing Team

How to structure client work so it survives being handed to somebody who was not in the original conversation.

Read the guide

Guide

How to Structure Client Delivery in a Professional Services Business

Standardising delivery in a professional services firm without constraining the judgement people are paying for.

Read the guide

Costs and profitability

What client work costs, what it makes, and why those are more than two numbers.

Guide

Project Cost Tracking: What to Track Before, During and After Client Work

A method for tracking cost on client work: what to set up before, the three numbers to watch during, and what to check after.

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Guide

Project Profitability: Revenue, Cost, Margin and Cash Explained

Revenue, cost, margin and cash position, with the arithmetic and a worked example.

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Client money

Agreements, invoices and getting paid without chasing people who have already paid.

Guide

Client Billing for Service Businesses: Agreements, Invoices and Payments

Agreements, schedules, invoices and payments, and the four numbers people confuse for one.

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Templates

Six spreadsheets for the things client work turns into: cost and margin, what clients owe, what the team is owed, and what arrived after the scope was agreed.

Free, no sign-up, and useful whatever software you use. Every formula has been evaluated against the sample data that ships with it.

Browse the templates

What These Are, and Are Not.

Each guide is written to answer one real question properly, with examples from service businesses rather than from a textbook. They should be useful whether or not you ever use Bikabo, and each one says at the end what Bikabo does about the subject, in one clearly marked place rather than throughout.

What you will not find here is a productivity listicle, a roundup of tools, or a post written to hold a keyword. If a subject does not have a real answer worth several hundred words, it does not get a page. The templates follow the same rule: each one has to be genuinely useful on its own, or it is not worth downloading.

See the Numbers While the Work Is Still Moving.

Everything in these guides, running as one system rather than five.