Timesheets are chased, not submitted
Weekly reminders by email, missing entries discovered at invoicing, and approval that happens in a thread rather than a system.
Sectors
Time, engagements and contracts, without the spreadsheets.
Zoho implementation for consultancies, audit firms and advisory practices — timesheets, engagement management, contract automation and billing.
Professional services firms sell time, and most of them track it in Excel. The same is true of engagement fees, contract creation and the handover from sale to delivery — each one an file that someone chases.
What we hear
What professional services businesses arrive with.
Engagement economics are invisible until the invoice
Jobs, fees, auditors and clients live in separate places, so nobody sees the position of an engagement while it is running.
Contracts are created by hand
Every new employee or vendor contract is typed afresh, with signer details copied across and no audit trail.
What we build
What a professional services platform usually contains.
Timesheet management with real approval
Daily and weekly submission, automated reminders, missing-timesheet tracking, employee dashboards, role-based access and three-level approval — built for a global professional services firm, replacing an Excel process.
Job and engagement management
Clients, contacts, projects, jobs and invoices in one application, with draft invoice creation pushed into Xero and a calendar view of meetings, leave and site visits. Delivered for an audit practice in Australia.
Contract automation
Forms in Creator that generate contracts in Zoho Contracts automatically, with signer details and attachments attached — and without needing a Contracts licence for every manager. Built for an office-equipment business and for a research consultancy.
Onboarding to billing, joined up
Customer onboarding, accounts, deals, approvals, deal-based project creation, task management, billing and contract management with central reporting, as built for a consulting firm.
Products this usually involves
Zoho CreatorZoho BooksZoho ContractsZoho ProjectsZoho PeopleZoho CRM
Proof
Work in this sector.
professional services
Audit jobs, fees and invoices in one place
Audit jobs, auditor assignments, fees and invoices tracked across spreadsheets and calendars. Now one application, with draft invoices created in the accounting system and a calendar view of everything scheduled.
Creator
professional services
Contracts generated from a form, without extra licences
Contracts were created by hand each time a sales manager needed one. Now submitting a form generates the contract with signer details and attachments already attached.
CreatorWriterContracts
professional services
Onboarding to billing, as one chain
Onboarding, deals, approvals, project delivery, billing and contracts each had an owner and no shared thread. Now a won deal creates its own project, and billing follows delivery.
CRMProjectsBooksPeople
professional services
Vendors, bills and employee contracts created automatically
Vendor records, employee bills and contracts were created by hand from data that already existed in two other systems. Now Creator sits between them and creates all three.
CreatorContractsBooksPeople
Questions
Asked most often in professional services.
Can it push invoices into the accounting system we already use?
Yes. We have created draft invoices in Xero from a Creator application, and integrated Zoho Books both ways elsewhere. Draft rather than sent, so your team still reviews before anything reaches a client.
Do all our managers need contract licences?
No. We have built exactly this: managers submit a form in Creator, and the contract is generated in Zoho Contracts without a licence for each of them.
Can we keep our existing Excel planning process?
Sometimes that is the right answer. For a broadcast services client we used AI and OCR to extract approved quote data from their existing Excel and PDF files and push it into Zoho Books, rather than forcing them to abandon a process that worked.
Tell us what you need Zoho to do.
Describe the problem and we will come back with a ballpark scope and timeline.