PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Project Management That Connects Professional Services Delivery to the Numbers Behind It.
Run client engagements, tasks, review, project costs, billing and team payments in one system, so the operational and financial sides of service delivery stay connected while the work is happening.
The Gap Between Delivery and Financial Visibility.
Most professional-services firms run delivery in one system and money in another. The work is tracked properly. The billing is done properly. What nobody can answer on a Tuesday is what the engagement currently in flight is going to be worth once it is finished.
That question needs both halves at once: what has been delivered, what it cost to deliver, what has been billed and what has been paid. Held in separate systems, the answer only arrives once the engagement is over.
Engagement-Based Client Work.
The Engagement is the unit: a commitment with a value, a currency, a team and a payment schedule. Deliverables sit inside it as Tasks, each with an owner and a reviewer.
One client can hold several engagements at once, so questions about the relationship and questions about a single piece of work both have somewhere to be answered.
Deliverables, Team and Review.
Work is assigned, submitted, reviewed and either approved or returned with a reason. Every pass through that loop is recorded, and reassigning a deliverable preserves what the previous owner did.
Approval is not delivery. Work can pass review and wait, and the client sees it as In Progress until it actually goes out.
Project Cost and Margin.
Cost comes from the work rather than from a parallel tracker: assigned, delivered, approved, priced at the agreement that applies. Three figures stay separate, because they answer different questions.
Pending exposure is what open work would cost if approved. Approved cost is what is genuinely owed. Paid cost is what has left the business. Confirmed and exposure margin follow from those, and cash position is reported separately again.
Client Agreements, Billing and Receivables.
Agreed value, payment schedule, invoices raised from that schedule, payments recorded against them, and a clear separation between what is outstanding overall, what is due now and what is genuinely late.
On the plans that include it, a receivables view ages outstanding amounts by client, and due-soon and overdue reminders go out on a schedule.
Team Compensation and Payouts.
The other half of the money, and the half most delivery systems leave out. Payouts are calculated from approved work rather than typed in, with advances deducted, partial payments recorded and a running balance per person.
Approving a payout and paying it are separate, separately recorded steps, which is what makes the gap between what you owe and what you have paid visible.
Client Portal and Role-Based Delegation.
Clients get their own view: engagements as In Progress or Completed, delivered documents, their conversation with your firm, and payment information where you enable it. Never internal review, cost or margin.
Internally, four Admin profiles divide the business along the lines firms actually delegate on, and only the Owner can appoint or remove an Admin.
Which Teams This Suits.
- Outsourced service providers delivering measurable work for client organisations.
- Implementation and onboarding teams working engagement by engagement.
- Data and back-office operations where output is countable.
- Distributed specialist teams delivering client work through delegation and review.
The common requirement is delegation. Work assigned to someone, checked by someone else, delivered to a client, and paid for on both sides.
Where Bikabo Fits Against a Traditional PSA Stack.
Professional services management without pretending every firm needs a full PSA platform. The two categories are built to answer different questions, and it is worth knowing which one you are asking before anyone buys anything.
| The question | A full PSA platform Built for firms managing capacity at scale | Bikabo Built for connecting delivery to its economics |
|---|---|---|
| Client engagements and delivery | Yes. | Yes. Engagements, deliverables, assignment, review and delivery. |
| Project cost and margin | Yes, usually from time entry. | Yes, from approved work, whether or not you run on timesheets. |
| Client billing and receivables | Yes. | Yes. Agreements, schedules, invoices, credit notes and aging. |
| Team compensation and payouts | Varies; often a separate system. | Yes. Approved earnings, payout periods, advances and payments. |
| Client-facing visibility | Varies. | A dedicated portal with its own sign-in. |
| Utilisation and capacity planning | Yes. Usually the core of the product. | No, by design. Bikabo measures what delivery actually cost rather than modelling how a bench should be filled. |
This compares Bikabo to a category rather than to any particular product, and PSA platforms differ considerably from one another.
Professional Services Questions
It covers part of what PSA platforms cover: engagements, delivery, review, project cost, client billing, team compensation and client visibility. Where it differs is the question it answers. PSA platforms are built around planning capacity, through utilisation modelling, resource forecasting and bench planning. Bikabo is built around what the work is costing while it is being delivered, which is the more useful question for firms whose margin is decided by delivery rather than by how full the bench is.
No. Cost is calculated from work that has been assigned, delivered and approved, priced at whichever compensation agreement applies. Hourly is one of seven models, not the assumption the product is built on.
Yes, and it handles the awkward case properly: an engagement billed in one currency delivered by a team paid in another. Rates are yours to configure and are recorded onto each transaction when it happens, so editing a rate never rewrites what is already on the books.
Review is a distinct stage with a named reviewer, and a recorded decision. Approval is separate from delivery, so work can pass review and still be waiting to go out.
Yes, and that split is built in rather than configured. Four Admin profiles divide delivery, finance, client relationships and full administration, and the permission to see cost on the work you run is separate from the permission to see the payout book.
No. It is not a general ledger, does not reconcile against a bank feed and does not file tax. It records what you agreed, what you billed, what you were paid and what delivery cost.