Good work gets done. It just doesn't all get billed.
Ask any partner and they'll tell you the team is busy. The puzzle is why "busy" and "profitable" keep drifting apart. The answer is leakage — the 15–25% of billable hours that a typical firm delivers but never recognises as revenue. It rarely leaks in one dramatic place. It seeps out of four.
Every gap between work done and revenue recognised is margin walking out the door.
1. Time logged late, or not at all
Timesheets filled from memory on Friday are a reconstruction, not a record. Minutes get rounded down, short calls get dropped, and whole tasks vanish. The fix is to stop asking people to remember: capture time passively from calendar, email and chat as the work happens, with approvals and rate cards built in.
2. WIP that ages out of sight
Work-in-progress nobody can see is work nobody bills. On long engagements, unbilled WIP ages quietly until realisation drops and it gets written down. Live WIP ageing — by client, matter and value, with bill-now nudges — turns a month-end surprise into a daily decision.
3. Invoicing that lags delivery by weeks
When raising an invoice means assembling spreadsheets and chasing narratives, billing slips by weeks and cash slips with it. One-click, GST-ready invoicing generated straight from delivery collapses the gap from weeks to days.
4. No early signal a matter is going unprofitable
By the time a write-off shows up in the accounts, the decision that caused it is months old. Revenue intelligence — leakage alerts, unbilled-time tracking, forecasting and client-health scoring — surfaces the problem while you can still act on it.
Winning it back
None of these gaps need heroics; they need a single ledger of truth that captures, bills and measures in one place. That's the bet behind TriAxis — and for most firms the recovered revenue pays for it well inside the first quarter.
Want to see where it leaks in your firm? Request a demo and we'll model your real numbers.