Project Management Software for Professional Services

Every kind of firm, the same underlying number

A consultancy, a design agency, a law firm and an accounting practice look like they have little in common day to day. But they all sell time against a rate, run several engagements at once, and live or die by one number, utilisation: how much of the team's capacity is actually going to billable, tracked work right now, not at month end.

Most firms only see that number after the fact, reconstructed from timesheets filled in late and status updates chased individually from each engagement lead. By the time it's assembled, the quarter it describes is already over, and whatever it shows can only inform the next quarter, not the one that just ended.

ShipSprint keeps the number current instead of reconstructing it, because logging and status come from the work itself, not a separate reporting exercise. That's project management for professional services built around one number, not a features list. In practice, a firm running this finds the five-second time log is what makes the difference: entries happen right after the task instead of a Friday reconstruction, so the utilisation figure a partner sees on Monday is close to true.

Utilisation is a symptom, not a target

Chasing a utilisation number directly tends to produce the wrong behaviour: people logging hours to look busy rather than tracking what actually happened. The number is more useful as a diagnostic: which engagements are overstaffed, which practice is quietly running thin, where a bench is sitting idle between engagements.

That only works if the underlying data is honest, which is why logging has to be fast enough that people do it accurately rather than reconstruct it from memory at month end.

One tool, whatever kind of firm you run

A firm might sell strategy engagements, design sprints, litigation matters or audit work; the underlying shape is the same: a client, a team, a scope, and hours that have to be accounted for. ShipSprint doesn't force a single project template onto all of that; each practice line can define its own stages and vocabulary while still rolling into the same forecasts and command center.

That matters most for firms that have grown by adding practice areas (a strategy arm that added an implementation team, an accounting firm that added advisory) where each side historically ran on its own spreadsheet and nobody above them could compare the two, let alone staff across them.

What a concurrent engagement actually looks like inside ShipSprint

A new engagement kicks off alongside four others already running, and the lead sizes its board against the team's real, already-committed capacity rather than an optimistic slot on a spreadsheet. A scope addition that arrives mid-engagement lands in triage instead of getting absorbed silently into an already full week. Hours logged against each task accumulate into a live utilisation picture rather than a number someone reconstructs at month end.

A few weeks in, the forecast (built from this team's own measured pace) flags that one engagement is trending over its allotted hours while another is running under capacity. That's the moment to rebalance staffing, not the moment you find out from a margin report six weeks later.

What poor utilisation visibility is quietly costing

A forty-person firm running fifteen concurrent engagements, where even one engagement in six is meaningfully over- or under-staffed without anyone noticing until month end, is leaving real margin on the table every month. Not from bad work, but from capacity nobody rebalanced in time.

A Business subscription for that firm costs a small fraction of one quarter's worth of that drift. Catching it a few weeks earlier, consistently, is most of the value.

Delivery and the back office, one subscription

Client-facing engagements are only part of a firm. Business development is building the pipeline, HR is managing recruitment across practice lines, and finance is closing out billing. Templates for each of those sit in the same subscription as engagement boards, so the whole firm, not just the delivery teams, runs on one system.

ShipSprint also connects to Claude and ChatGPT, so a managing partner can ask which practice line is over capacity this month in plain language, instead of collecting a status report from each lead.

One client, three practice lines, no dropped threads

The clients worth having tend to buy more than one thing over time: a strategy engagement that turns into an implementation project, an audit relationship that grows an advisory arm alongside it. That's good for the firm and genuinely difficult to coordinate, because the two engagements are usually staffed, billed and tracked by entirely different teams who rarely compare notes.

Because every practice line sits in the same workspace, a client's history (prior engagements, decisions on file in the wiki, who's staffed where) is visible across practice lines without anyone having to ask around first. The second engagement doesn't start from zero just because it's a different team's board.

Utilisation without surveillance

This distinction matters more at a firm selling hours than almost anywhere else: ShipSprint takes no screenshots, logs no keystrokes and tracks no activity. Only delivered work and hours logged by the person who logged them. Scorecards are leave-adjusted and visible to the person they describe, so utilisation pressure doesn't turn into penalising someone for approved leave.

Starting with one practice line, not the whole firm

The easiest way in is a single practice line running its own board for a few weeks (real hours logged, real forecasts generated) before asking a second practice line to adopt anything. What usually convinces the second team is seeing the first one catch a staffing imbalance early, not a pitch from another department.

The Free plan covers that scale. Extending to the rest of the firm afterward is a subscription upgrade within the same workspace, not a separate rollout.

What it costs

• Free covers up to 5 users and 2 projects, permanently: enough for one practice line to try it before it spreads firm-wide.
• Team is ₹299 per user per month (₹2,899 a year), up to 40 users.
• Business is ₹599 per user per month (₹6,499 a year), adding forecasts, scorecards and the cross-practice command center.
• Every paid plan opens with a 14-day full-access trial on Business, a sample project preloaded, no card required. See pricing.