CRM for Professional Services

Professional services firms — law practices, accounting firms, architecture studios, engineering consultancies — share a common challenge: managing complex client engagements where time is the primary product. You need to track billable hours precisely, allocate resources across multiple active engagements, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks on client deliverables.

Configuration recipe. This page is a guide to configuring HARi for a professional services firm. It is not a one-click install — the entities, fields and workflows below are ones you build on top of the core CRM and Billing solutions.

Professional services CRM challenges

• Billable hour tracking — every hour needs accurate logging to maximize revenue
• Engagement complexity — clients may have multiple concurrent matters, each with different teams and budgets
• Resource allocation — knowing which professionals are available and appropriately skilled for each engagement
• Client communication — maintaining detailed records of advice given, decisions made, and documents exchanged

How HARi handles this

The CRM solution gives you Companies and Contacts; the Billing solution adds Invoices. Add Engagement, Task, and Time Entry entities yourself, and use Workflows to drive engagement onboarding, billing prep, and budget alerts.

Entities and fields to set up

• Clients (Companies) — industry, billing contact, credit terms, lifetime revenue, relationship partner
• Contacts — role, authority level, communication preferences
• Engagements — linked to Client, type (Advisory / Audit / Litigation / Transaction), status, budget, partner responsible, team members
• Tasks — linked to Engagement, description, assignee, due date, estimated hours, status, priority
• Time Entries — linked to Engagement and Task, professional, date, hours, rate, description, billable flag, write-off flag
• Invoices — linked to Engagement, billing period, billable hours summary, expenses, total, status

Suggested workflows

Configure these in Settings > Workflows:

1. Engagement onboarding — when a new engagement is created, generate a standard set of tasks based on engagement type
2. Billing preparation — on the first of each month, create draft invoices for all active engagements with unbilled time
3. Budget warning — when an engagement reaches 75% of its budget, notify the partner and the team
4. Task escalation — if a task passes its due date, escalate to the engagement partner
5. Engagement review — when an engagement is marked complete, create tasks for final billing, file archival, and client feedback

Key dashboard widgets

• Utilization rate by professional
• Billable vs. non-billable hours (this month)
• Active engagements by type
• Revenue by client
• Overdue tasks by engagement

Get started

1. Sign up for a free HARi account and install the CRM and Billing solutions from Settings > Solutions.
2. In Settings > Schema, add Engagement, Task, and Time Entry entities with the fields above.
3. Configure the suggested workflows in Settings > Workflows.
4. Build a practice dashboard from Dashboards with the suggested widgets.