A Consulting Firm's Close, Worked Two Ways

Unbilled time gets pulled from the timesheet system into a reconciliation task, assigned to the engagement manager who actually knows whether that time is billable or write-off, with a due date attached. The checklist forces the review to happen before revenue posts, rather than after, which is the single biggest lever for accurate monthly numbers at a firm like this. Partner draws get reconciled against the capital account schedule as a standing task each month, so nobody discovers a mismatch three quarters later at tax time.

What FloQast doesn't do is judge whether a given hour of unbilled time should actually be written off; a human reviewer still makes that call, and the tool helps make sure the call gets made on schedule instead of skipped.

If this firm runs engagements billed in more than one currency, or operates as more than one legal entity because of a regional office structure, BlackLine's matching and consolidation tools remove a layer of manual currency translation and intercompany elimination work that FloQast doesn't handle as natively. For a firm at this size without multi-entity complexity, that extra capability often goes unused, which is the honest case against choosing BlackLine by default.

In both scenarios, the reconciliation that eats the most hours isn't unbilled time, it's write-off decisions on stalled engagements: work performed that a client disputes, or a scope creep item nobody billed for. Firms in the broader services category this firm sits in carry payables for an average of 24.4 days¹, a relatively short cycle that reflects how quickly professional services firms typically pay their own vendors, and a useful contrast to how much longer unresolved client write-off decisions tend to sit open by comparison.

A partner who bills time inconsistently, sometimes logging real hours and sometimes rounding to whatever feels fair, poisons every downstream reconciliation. Neither platform can catch that at the source; both can only surface the resulting variance after the fact. Fixing time-entry discipline at the point of entry is worth more than any close software purchase for a firm this size.

For a single-entity domestic firm with a disciplined billing culture, FloQast's lighter setup and faster adoption tends to win on cost and speed. For a firm operating across borders, across entities, or heading toward a merger with another practice, BlackLine's consolidation strength starts to justify its heavier setup. Firms that aren't sure which category they're in should ask where they expect to be in two years, not just where they are now, since migrating close tools mid-growth is its own disruption.

Signals that point to each option:

• A single entity, domestic billing and disciplined time entry point toward FloQast's lighter setup, faster adoption and lower cost.
• Billing in more than one currency or running regional offices as separate entities points toward BlackLine's matching and consolidation tools.
• A planned merger with another practice is a reason to weigh BlackLine's consolidation strength.
• Fix time-entry discipline at the point of entry first, since neither platform can catch inconsistent time logging at the source.

The engagement manager who logged the time is the wrong person to make the final call on whether disputed hours get written off; they're too close to the work to be objective about it. A cleaner chain runs the engagement manager's recommendation up to a practice lead or controller who reviews it against the client relationship and the firm's overall write-off trend for the quarter. Whichever platform you use, build that two-step review into the checklist itself rather than trusting it will happen informally, since informal reviews are the first thing to slip when a partner's calendar fills up.

A firm that skips the second step tends to discover the pattern only at year end, when a controller finally pulls a full-year write-off report and finds one engagement manager's numbers look nothing like everyone else's.

A newly admitted partner often inherits client relationships without inheriting the firm's close habits, and that gap shows up fastest in inconsistent time entry and slow reconciliation sign-off. Treat close discipline as part of partner onboarding, not something picked up by osmosis. A short walkthrough of the checklist, the write-off review standard, and the capital account reconciliation saves months of cleanup later, and it sets the expectation early that the firm's numbers are reviewed with the same rigor the firm applies to a client engagement.