IndustriesProfessional services
A services firm sells time it cannot store. Every hour not sold is gone, and the gap between the rate on the card and the rate actually realised is where the profit went.
Delivered in Saudi Arabia
Last reviewed
The accounting problem
01
Chargeable hours over available hours determines whether the firm is profitable at any given headcount. It has to be measured per person, per grade and per period, and it has to distinguish genuinely non-chargeable work from chargeable work that was written off — which look identical in most systems and mean opposite things.
02
Discounts, negotiated caps, write-offs and hours nobody dared bill all erode the nominal rate. A firm that reports at standard rates is looking at revenue it never collected, and the client that looks most profitable is frequently the one absorbing the most write-off.
03
A fixed-fee engagement is recognised on progress against an estimate to complete, exactly like a construction contract. If the estimate is not maintained the revenue recognised is wrong all the way through and the loss appears at the end, when nothing can be done about it.
04
Time recorded and not yet invoiced sits as work in progress. The older it gets the less likely it is to be billed in full, and a WIP balance with no ageing discipline is a write-off accumulating out of sight.
What NetSuite does about it
Hours are booked to the project with chargeable status, valued at cost and at charge-out rate. Utilisation by person and by grade, and cost by project, come from the same entry rather than from two parallel systems.
Client and grade rate cards drive billing, and realisation is reported as billed against standard, so discounting and write-off are visible per client and per partner rather than aggregated into a firm-wide average.
Fixed-fee work recognises against an estimate to complete maintained on the project, with over- and under-billing falling out at period close — the same mechanism the contracting build uses, because it is the same problem.
Unbilled time is carried as WIP with an age profile, so the conversation about whether it will ever be billed happens while it still can be.
Compliance · the UAE
Professional fees are B2B and fall in scope for structured e-invoicing across effectively the whole sales ledger. Firms billing clients outside the UAE are running domestic structured documents and export invoices through the same billing cycle.
UAE e-invoicing in NetSuite →A scoping call, not a sales qualifier. Bring the report you cannot produce today and we will tell you what it takes to produce it.