Choosing between Profitdrive and the tools you already know
Most firms that look at Profitdrive already run something: a spreadsheet the owner trusts, a time tracker, a resourcing board, or a full services platform. This page is written to help you decide, from our side of the table but without pretending the other tools do nothing. Start with the work you sell. It decides more than any feature list.
Start with the shape of your work
Services firms sell work in two broad shapes, and the tool that fits one rarely fits the other.
Many short pieces, people spread across several at once. Creative and digital agencies, and some consultancies, run dozens of projects a month. People move between them weekly. Retainers get used up, briefs change, the plan is rebuilt every Monday. The daily question is allocation: who works on what this week, is the project still on budget, has the retainer run out, and what goes on the invoice. A full-workflow services platform, what the market calls professional services automation, is built for that question. Tasks, weekly scheduling, retainers, time straight to invoice, dozens of reports on it.
Fewer, longer engagements, people assigned for months. IT services and consulting firms sell projects and programmes that run for months, staffed against a plan, priced as fixed price or time and materials. The plan does not change every week. What changes is the commercial position: an extension is offered, a change request lands, a role stays unfilled, a rate is renegotiated, a pipeline deal closes or slips and decides whether the bench grows. The question is not who works on what this week. It is where company profit is heading and what moves it. Profitdrive is built for that question. In category terms it is professional services automation as well; it is built for the second shape of work.
Neither shape is better, and neither tool is. If your week is spent reallocating people across many short projects, a services platform will serve you well and Profitdrive will feel like it is answering a question you did not ask. If your months are spent deciding which engagements to sell, how to staff them, and what the bench and the overhead do to the year, the reverse is true.
The tools a firm weighs
The private costing sheet. The owner's own spreadsheet, built over years, trusted because it is theirs. It prices deals well. Its weakness is that it cannot stay one object: the project manager re-keys a plan from it, finance stitches a third version together after the work has moved, and every hand that touches it forks the truth. It has no view of the pipeline, the bench or the overhead at the same time.
Time and billing tools. Harvest-class trackers capture hours cleanly and turn them into invoices. They know what was worked. They do not know what was sold, at what margin, against what staffing plan, so they cannot say whether a full week was a profitable one.
Resourcing and capacity tools. Runn and its peers show who is booked, who is free, and what a tentative project would do to utilisation. That is a real forward view of people. It stops at project revenue and cost; overhead and company profit are outside it.
Full-workflow services platforms. Scoro, Productive, BigTime and Kantata run the operational workflow end to end: pipeline and quoting, natively or through the CRM they connect to, projects and tasks, time, resource scheduling, invoicing, and reporting across all of it, and in most of them revenue recognition and forecasts of revenue from active work and the pipeline. Their profit view is strongest at the project and client level. How far each carries overhead, the bench and unfilled roles into a forward figure for company profit varies by product and by plan, and it is the one thing worth checking for yourself before you choose. Kantata sits at the larger end of the market.
Profitdrive. A forward view of company profit built from the deal outward. The pipeline, the projects, the people and their cost, the timecards and the overhead connect into one outlook of revenue and Operating Income, with the accounting actuals beside it for comparison, in three views: contracted work, contracted plus extensions, and with the pipeline added. Every figure opens to the deal, the assignment and the person behind it. It does not run tasks, it does not issue invoices, and it does not replace your accounting system.
Where they overlap
Pipeline, projects, timecards and utilisation appear in a services platform, in a resourcing tool and in Profitdrive. The overlap is real and it is fair to say so. The difference is what each tool does with them.
| Area | In a services platform or resourcing tool | In Profitdrive |
|---|---|---|
| Pipeline | Deals and quotes, a revenue forecast from the pipeline | Deals carry a costed staffing model, so a deal moves the forward P&L, not just the revenue line |
| Projects | Tasks, phases, budget burn, project margin | Delivery cost and margin by role and phase, read against what was sold |
| Timecards | Hours to invoice, billable and non-billable | Hours as a cost fact against the plan, and as invoice lines for your accounting system |
| Utilisation | Live heatmaps, weekly scheduling | Capacity against demand by firmness: contracted, extension, pipeline |
If your firm needs the left column every day, the right column is not a substitute. If your firm needs the right column, the left column is a lot of machinery for a question you do not have.
Where Profitdrive is different
Three things, stated plainly.
The outlook is the company's, not the project's. Delivery cost, then Non-Billable Production Cost (the bench, internal-project and leave-related cost that does not attach to client delivery), then overhead, down to Operating Income, month by month, before the month has happened. A project view tells you which projects made money. This tells you where the year lands and what would change it.
It starts from the deal. The staffing model priced in the deal becomes the project's plan when the deal is won. Open roles are priced in the deal before anyone is hired, so an unfilled role is a cost you can see, not a surprise in the month-end pack. Variance is read against what was sold.
It keeps the reasons in view. Any figure opens to the drivers behind it, and the outlook keeps the assumptions behind every figure in view, so the conversation is about the decision, not about whose spreadsheet is right.
Where a services platform is stronger
Said just as plainly. If you need any of these every week, a services platform is the better tool.
- Invoicing in every form: fixed price, time and materials, retainers, recurring billing, multi-currency, from inside the same system. Profitdrive generates invoice lines for your accounting system and stops there.
- Revenue recognition and work in progress reporting.
- Task management for the delivery team. Profitdrive deliberately does not do this.
- Breadth: dozens of reports, dozens of integrations, purchase orders and expense capture.
- Multi-office, multi-entity operation at scale.
We would rather you knew this before you evaluated Profitdrive than during.
How each is priced
A services platform is usually priced per user on feature tiers, sometimes with a minimum number of seats. A resourcing tool is usually priced per person managed. Profitdrive is priced by seat matched to what each person does: Leadership A$85, Manager A$45 and Team Member A$15 per seat per month, AUD excluding GST, billed annually, or A$99, A$54 and A$18 billed monthly. The price sits where the decisions sit, and every person who records time holds a paid Team Member seat, because every timecard is a cost fact the outlook depends on. We do not publish comparisons of what other tools cost; their pricing pages are the right source.
Three questions that decide it
- What changes in your business week to week: the plan, or the commercial position? If the plan, look at a services platform. If the position, look here.
- Where is your profit decided: in the running of the project, or in the deal review and on the bench? Agencies mostly the former. IT services and consulting mostly the latter.
- Who needs the answer most days: the delivery lead, or the owner and the finance lead? A services platform is built for the first. Profitdrive is built for the second, and gives the delivery lead the operating view without the firm's financials.
One question worth asking first
If you know your project margins today, do you also know where company profit lands six months from now, and which decision in front of you would move it most? If the honest answer is no, that is the gap Profitdrive exists to close. If the answer is yes, and it comes from the tool you already run, keep it.
Want to see the outlook before you decide?
Descriptions of other tools are drawn from each vendor's public documentation. If we have something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.