A Checklist for Executive Advisory Firms Choosing ERP

Retained search fees are typically billed in installments tied to search milestones, recognized as each stage is completed. Fractional-placement billing behaves more like a subscription, recognized evenly as the fractional executive delivers ongoing work. Equity or warrant compensation earned on a successful placement is a different animal entirely and usually needs its own valuation and recognition treatment, one worth confirming directly with your CPA rather than guessing at a standard approach. A system that can't apply three different recognition patterns to three different revenue types without manual override spreadsheets will make your monthly close a reconstruction exercise every time.

The firms that get this wrong most often are ones that started as a single consultant billing hourly and grew into a multi-advisor boutique without ever revisiting the original, simpler chart of accounts. What worked for one person's invoices doesn't hold up once placement fees, fractional retainers, and contractor payouts are all running through the same handful of generic categories.

Most fractional advisory boutiques pay their executives as contractors, and the accounting mistakes cluster around a few repeatable patterns.

• Booking the full client invoice as revenue and the contractor payout as a flat expense, which hides the true margin on each individual placement.
• Not tracking placement-level profitability separately, so a boutique can't tell which advisors or which client segments are actually driving profit.
• Treating expense reimbursements to fractional executives as revenue-reducing when they should be tracked as a pass-through, not blended into margin.
• Letting search milestone billing get invoiced late because nobody owns the trigger for the next billing stage.
• Skipping a documented policy for how equity compensation is valued and recorded, leaving that treatment to whoever handles the placement that quarter.

Once a boutique is running more than a handful of active placements, dimensional reporting, tagging revenue and payout by advisor, client, and engagement type, becomes the difference between knowing which relationships are working and guessing. Sage Intacct's dimensional structure handles this directly and tends to be the faster path to clean reporting for a firm below roughly fifty active placements at once. Gross margin also varies a lot between search fees and fractional-placement billing, so benchmarking your own blended number against a single industry figure can be misleading without breaking the two apart first¹.

This is also where advisor-level performance conversations get easier. A boutique that can see margin by advisor, not just total placements closed, can have a much more specific conversation about which relationships to grow and which advisors need support, instead of relying on a general sense of who seems busy.

Confirm the system can apply three distinct revenue recognition patterns by contract type without manual overrides. Confirm it can tag placement-level profitability by advisor and client simultaneously. Confirm your equity compensation valuation policy is documented and reviewed with your CPA before you configure how it's recorded. And confirm your receivables days match how your specific client base actually pays, since payment terms in executive search and advisory work vary widely by client size and industry².

A boutique with a handful of active placements and simple retained-search billing can often run well on QuickBooks with a project-tracking add-on well into its growth. The honest signal you've outgrown it is when placement-level margin reporting takes real staff time to reconstruct every month instead of a few clicks, which is usually the point where Sage Intacct's dimensional accounting starts to pay for itself.

Because most fractional executives are paid as contractors rather than employees, payout timing directly shapes your cash position in a way that's easy to overlook until it becomes a problem. A boutique that pays contractors faster than it collects from clients is quietly financing its own placements out of pocket, and neither platform prevents that on its own; it takes a deliberate payables days policy tied to your actual client payment terms³. Build that policy before you scale placement volume, not after cash gets tight.