Every deal you win is someone's calendar.
Time and materials or fixed bid, nearshore or on-site, one architect or a squad of nine — the constraint never changes. Who is free, when, at what rate, and for how long. That answer lives in a resourcing spreadsheet a delivery lead updates on Fridays, and the pipeline it should be governing has never once read it.
The bench is a spreadsheet updated on Fridays.
Sales commits three senior engineers starting in two weeks. Delivery has one, and the other two are on a project that slipped. Neither side was wrong; they were reading different documents. By the time the mismatch surfaces it is a staffing escalation, a subcontractor at a worse margin, or a start date the client remembers for a year.
You cannot forecast what you cannot staff.
IT consulting — bench and marginA pipeline that knows what it costs to deliver.
Roles on the deal, not in the proposal
Every opportunity carries its lines: role, seniority, bill rate, cost rate, start date, duration and delivery location. A deal stops being one number and becomes six people with dates, which is the only form the resourcing conversation can use.
Bench visible from the pipeline
Weighted deals pushed into resourcing as demand by role and week, whether that is Kantata, Float or the spreadsheet you already trust. A practice lead sees the crunch or the gap a month out instead of on the Monday it arrives.
Time and materials and fixed bid, told apart
Two economics, one record. T&M forecasts on hours per week against rate; fixed bid forecasts on milestones and burn. Reporting them as one blended number is how firms discover in Q4 that the growth was in the wrong half.
Timesheets reconciled to the SOW
Harvest, Clockify or Jira hours matched to the SOW line they were sold against, so realisation, write-off and effective rate land on the account rather than in a finance model rebuilt every month.
The partner channel, registered
Deal registration in the AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or HubSpot partner portals recorded on the opportunity along with the co-sell status and the partner contact — so partner-sourced revenue is reportable and an MDF claim comes out of the CRM rather than a memory.
Extensions treated as deals
A contractor extension, a rate change, a backfill and a scope addition are revenue events. Each one opens sixty days before the assignment ends, with an owner, rather than arriving as a client email nobody was ready for.
From the last twelve SOWs to a live loop.
Read the last twelve SOWs
How work is actually scoped, priced and staffed here — not how the proposal template says it is. Where the estimate came from, who changed it, and what the delivery team did with it afterwards.
One rate card, one role taxonomy
Role names that agree across the CRM, the resourcing tool, the timesheet and the invoice. This is the unglamorous week that decides whether utilisation reporting will ever reconcile.
Build the loop
Pipeline into resourcing, resourcing into the delivery tool, hours back onto the account. Each hop is an explicit contract with a direction and an owner, so no field is written by two systems.
Hand it to delivery leads
The people who run the staffing meeting own the system that feeds it. Documentation, training, and a quarter of us in the room while the forecast and the bench start agreeing.
Margin leaks one contractor at a time.
A developer is placed at a spread that made sense two years ago. Two merit cycles move the cost rate; the bill rate never moves, because reviewing it was nobody's job and the client never asked. The account still looks healthy on revenue and half the seats on it are near zero margin. A rate review date belongs on the assignment record, with an owner, exactly like a renewal.
Bring the staffing spreadsheet.
Tell us what you are running
What the system does today, where it breaks, and when it has to work. An engineer reads it — you get an answer inside one business day, not a sequence.