Consulting and agency software for projects, milestones and invoices

A profitable firm can still run out of cash

Consulting money is lumpy in a way trading money is not. A twelve-million-shilling engagement is one signature, three milestones and five months, while rent and two associates recur on a calendar that does not care where the client's approval has got to.

The dangerous number is not profit, it is the distance between delivering and being paid. Work sits finished but uninvoiced because whoever ran it moved on to the next proposal, and clients deduct withholding tax, so what lands is never what was invoiced.

PesaScope tracks the whole line: the quote you sent, the invoice raised against it, the payment that arrived and the balance outstanding — per client, per project, aged so you know how stale it is.

From proposal to payment

1. Send a priced quoteLine items, VAT-inclusive or not, saved as a draft and marked sent when it goes out. Each quote moves through sent, accepted, rejected or expired, so the pipeline is a list, not a memory.
2. Open a project when it is wonClient, location, dates and a budget. Quotes, invoices and purchases attach to it, and the summary shows invoiced against spent.
3. Invoice each milestoneConvert the accepted quote into an invoice for a percentage of its value at each phase, rather than retyping the whole thing.
4. Record what actually arrivedPartial payments are supported: the balance updates and the invoice moves to partially paid, then paid. Anything past due is flagged overdue.

What a firm sells

Pick "Consulting & agency" at sign-up and this list is already there. Everything is a service; there is no stock in a consulting business, only work and the people who do it.

Keep retainers as their own lines. A retainer invoiced identically every month while absorbing more work each month is the commonest way a firm quietly loses money.

One engagement: a strategy and systems review

Fifty-nine percent, which is a good project. But it arrives in three milestone payments across five months, each six percent lighter after withholding tax, while the associates are paid in the weeks they work. The engagement is profitable and still leaves you short in month two.

There is no time tracking, and that decides whether this fits you

PesaScope has no timesheets, no billable-hour capture and no utilisation report. If your firm bills by the hour and your invoices are built from logged time per person, PesaScope is the wrong tool and no configuration will make it the right one.

It is built for fixed-fee, milestone and retainer work, where what matters is what you quoted, what you invoiced, what came in and what the engagement cost. That covers most firms here, but it is worth knowing before you sign up.

There is no withholding-tax field either. When a client deducts six percent and remits the rest, you record what arrived and the invoice shows as partly paid — the deduction stays visible as a gap you reconcile yourself.

Where a consulting firm leaks money

1. Work delivered but never invoicedA milestone signed off in a meeting and forgotten. With the quote in the system, the uninvoiced portion is visible.
2. Proposals that go nowhereThe Pro dashboard shows your quote pipeline and conversion rate. A firm winning one in six spends real money losing five.
3. Retainers that became unlimitedSame fee, three times the requests. Record the work under the retainer and the drift becomes a figure you can take to the client.
4. Chasing done by whoever remembersSet the reminder offsets once and PesaScope emails the invoice on schedule.

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