Industry
In professional services, most time is lost before it is billed.
An engineering and consulting firm with 300 employees: Microsoft 365, a time tracking system, HubSpot in sales, a ticket system for client requests, accounting via DATEV. Billing is on a time-and-materials basis. On Friday afternoon, consultants reconstruct their week from their calendars and inboxes; at month end, administration sorts time entries by project and asks what "coordination" is supposed to mean on the invoice. Part of the work done never appears on an invoice. AI for professional services therefore starts with time recording: time is captured while the work happens, not from memory on Friday.
Workflows
Five workflows that pay off in professional services
A service firm's product is its people's time. Every hour that ends up in administration instead of with the client is lost twice. The analysis shows which workflows pay off for you.
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Recording time without timesheets
Calendar, email, tickets, Teams, time tracking
Anyone billing on a time-and-materials basis typically writes up dozens of entries from memory every week. The workflow reads appointments, emails, tickets and work sessions and proposes time entries from them, already assigned to the right project. The employee confirms or corrects instead of reconstructing. Only what they approve gets booked.
Tools that fit youService -
Preparing billing
Time tracking, project budgets, invoicing software, DATEV interface
At month end, a firm with a few hundred employees has thousands of entries that need to become invoices. The workflow groups them by project and service, words line items in the client's language instead of internal shorthand, and checks them against budget and contract. It flags overruns and entries without a project before anything is sent. The finished documents go to DATEV via the interface.
Tools that fit youService -
Sorting the inbox and enquiries
Exchange, shared inboxes, ticket system, CRM
Project managers often receive a hundred or more emails a day, and some of them are tasks that exist in no system. The workflow reads incoming emails, assigns them to client and project, creates tasks in the ticket system and prepares replies to routine questions as drafts. New enquiries land in the CRM with all details, with the right contact person. Nothing is sent until a person approves the draft.
Sales and communicationService -
Putting together proposals and tenders
SharePoint, previous proposals, project references, profiles
For a public tender, a consultancy needs reference projects, staff profiles, methodology and a price sheet, spread across years of proposals on SharePoint. The workflow reads the tender, extracts the requirements and assembles matching references and text modules from previous proposals. It lists any missing evidence. The team works on the content, not on hunting for material.
Texts and content at scaleService -
Reconciling client and project data
CRM, time tracking, invoicing software, DATEV
The same client has a different name in the CRM than in time tracking and in the invoicing software, and projects stay open although they have ended. The workflow reconciles master data across all systems, merges duplicates according to your rules and flags projects with no bookings for weeks. After that, reports per client match across all systems for the first time. Every change is logged.
Putting data in orderService
Systems
Typical systems in professional services
Few specialist systems, a lot of Microsoft 365 and a time tracking tool nobody likes using. The manual work happens in between.
- CollaborationMicrosoft 365, Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, Google Workspace
- Time and projectsTime tracking and project software with an interface, Excel timesheets
- CRM and salesHubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
- Service and ticketsJira Service Management, Freshdesk, Zendesk, shared inboxes
- AccountingDATEV interface, invoicing software, document filing
- HRPersonio, staff profiles, skills databases
Objections
What matters most in professional services
The objections raised first in consulting and service firms, and our answers.
- Professional secrecy and client confidentiality. Client data stays in your systems, the data flow is disclosed for each workflow, and for professionals bound by secrecy under section 203 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) we commit to confidentiality in writing and choose the operating mode accordingly.
- Time-and-materials billing. Every proposed time entry has evidence, such as an appointment, an email or a ticket, and is only booked once the person approves it; this makes billing more traceable, not less transparent.
- Knowledge in people's heads. The analysis starts with the people who do the work, and what they know becomes rules in the workflow that still apply when someone is on holiday or leaves the company.
- Time recording and the works council. Automatic recording is subject to co-determination under section 87(1) no. 6 of the German Works Constitution Act (BetrVG); with us it serves billing, not employee assessment, and we supply the documents for a works agreement.
- No IT team of your own. You need someone who grants access and makes decisions; we take care of the build, operation and monitoring.
Evidence
A case from the industry: ourselves
This case is our own operations. As a service provider with dozens of client systems, we know from our own experience what it means when tasks arrive by email, by phone and in work sessions, when billing is by time spent and when clients query invoices. Today, our work sessions are automatically recorded as tasks, named, estimated and prepared for billing. Emails are read, assigned and presented with a draft reply, calls are turned into cases, and client systems are checked at night.
There are no timesheets any more, and billing is fully sorted at month end. Here too, something went wrong: the automatic naming was too technical for invoices at first and got a rule of its own: invoice titles in the client's language.
Prices
Prices
Analysis, build and ongoing operation have fixed prices that are published on our website, and after each stage you decide again. The cost of a workflow such as time recording without timesheets or billing preparation is set as a fixed price after the analysis: Approach and prices.
Handover
The first step is a 30-minute call.
You tell us about the workflow that costs you the most time. We tell you honestly whether AI pays off there and what the next step would be. Whether a workflow analysis follows is up to you.