Utilization problems get discovered at month-end — when they're already unbillable history.

The situation

The data exists; the visibility doesn't

The firm has a timesheet system, a project tracker, and an invoicing tool. None of them talk to each other, and nobody looks at any of them until finance forces the issue at close. Timesheets arrive late — some consultants log daily, others reconstruct the month from calendar memory on the 30th. Project budgets live in the proposals folder; actual burn lives in the timesheet tool; the gap between them lives nowhere.

The bench is invisible in the other direction. A consultant rolling off an engagement mid-month is idle for two weeks before staffing notices, because staffing conversations happen when a partner asks — not when the data changes. Meanwhile, out-of-scope work gets delivered and forgotten: a client asked for an extra workshop, a team ran it, and no change order or invoice line ever followed.

Close itself drags a week because finance starts by chasing what's missing — unfiled timesheets, unapproved expenses, delivery confirmations — discovering each gap serially instead of seeing them all on day one.

The work

What Taz builds for this firm

Taz builds a weekly pulse from exports of the three systems the firm already runs, with written rules for what counts as an exception and a digest partners actually read.

• Data assembly: Weekly exports from the timesheet, project, and invoicing tools are normalized into one per-consultant, per-project view — no new systems, no migration, no consultant behavior change required on day one.
• Utilization exceptions: Written thresholds the partners set: consultants under target with no staffed pipeline, timesheets missing past the grace window, and projects whose actual burn crosses budget percentages — each flagged with the underlying numbers, not just a red cell.
• Unbilled-work detection: Delivered milestones and logged hours are cross-checked against invoice lines, so out-of-scope work and missed invoicing show up as weekly exceptions instead of year-end write-offs.
• Close-readiness checklist: The digest tracks what close will need — timesheet completeness, expense approvals, milestone confirmations — as a running score through the month, so the close-week chase becomes a week-two nudge.
• Partner digest: One weekly document, exceptions first: bench and utilization flags, budget-burn warnings, unbilled work found, and close-readiness — every item traceable to its source export.

The deliverable

What the firm receives

• Working pulse pipeline — export ingestion through weekly digest, running on the firm's real data, with operating instructions the office manager can follow.
• Exception rulebook — utilization thresholds, burn warnings, and staleness windows as a written document partners can amend without touching the pipeline.
• Unbilled-work reconciliation spec — the cross-check logic between delivery and invoicing, with the assumptions stated.
• Four live digests — produced from real weeks during the engagement, format proven on the firm's own numbers before handover.
• Operating guide — who runs it, the weekly time cost, and the boundary list: what the pulse reads, and what it never touches.