Operations & Workforce Management
- Workload balancing — See who’s overloaded and get recommendations for reassigning tasks based on capacity, staff level, specialization, and prior experience.
- Capacity planning — Identify where staff have more hours of work than available time and get suggested solutions for redistributing work.
- Staffing assignments — When new projects come in, ask Answers who should handle the work based on who did it last year, partner and manager assignments, complexity, and current availability.
- Time entry compliance — Track which staff members are behind on entering their time for the week.
- Staff performance tracking — See who’s above or below their billable hour targets and how the team is trending.
Financial Analysis
- Cash flow forecasting — Forecast weekly cash flows based on client historical payment patterns.
- Cost and profitability analysis — Compare cost rates against billing rates to analyze profit by employee or project.
- Commission reports — Generate quarterly commission reports that previously required hours of manual work.
- Bonus plan modeling — Pull historical data for each metric in a bonus plan to see how it would have paid out in prior years.
- New and lost client analysis — Analyze client additions and departures across a variety of factors.
Tax & Project Operations
- Project pipeline tracking — See how many projects have been received, how many are at risk of needing extensions, and the total hours of outstanding work.
- Year-over-year comparisons — Compare this year’s billable hours, utilization, and project counts against the same period last year.
- Extension risk analysis — Identify projects likely to need extensions based on received date, complexity, and current progress.
- Departed staff impact — Quantify hours lost from departed employees and see how much new hires and continuing staff are offsetting.
Client Management
- Client grouping recommendations — Find clients that should be grouped together based on shared partners, addresses, email domains, or phone numbers — with confidence scores.
- Client lookup — Quickly pull up a summary of any client and their recent activity without navigating PCS directly.
Research
- Industry benchmarks — Compare your firm’s metrics against industry standards.