Surface the $340K leak in your delivery process.
Inspector’s operations and finance agents analyse project data, utilisation rates and billing patterns. They surface three specific workflow breakpoints and estimate $340K in recoverable annual margin, enough to rebuild the ops team around.
Run Inspector- 1
Describe the task
Inspector reads your project, staffing, and billing data the way a fractional COO would, hunting for the places where hours are worked but not billed, work is scoped but not tracked, and utilisation quietly leaks margin. It does not just report utilisation rates; it isolates the specific workflow breakpoints costing you money and puts a dollar figure on fixing each one.
The tighter your prompt, the more actionable the leaks. Tell Inspector which margin you are protecting, how you bill (fixed-fee, T&M, retainer), and what "good" utilisation looks like for your firm, and it will size the recoverable margin against your reality instead of a generic benchmark.
Analyse our delivery process for margin leakage across the last 4 quarters. Use projects-export.csv, timesheets.csv, and billing-ledger.xlsx. Hunt for: - Hours worked but never billed (write-offs, scope creep, admin drag) - Roles staffed above the billable rate the project can support - Utilisation gaps between benchmark (72% target) and actual, by role and team Isolate the top workflow breakpoints, quantify the annual recoverable margin for each, and rank them by ease of fix. End with the single change that recovers the most margin for the least disruption.
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Give Inspector context
In an Inspector workspace, connect the three systems that hold the truth about delivery economics: the project register, the timesheet export, and the billing ledger. Inspector joins them on project and person, so it can see a full week logged against a project that only invoiced four days, the gap most firms never surface.
Tell Inspector your target utilisation and your standard bill rates by role. Leakage is the distance between what should have been billed and what was; without your targets, Inspector can only describe patterns, not price them.
Required contextA project export with budget, fee type, and status per engagementTimesheet data joined to projects and people, hours logged by roleOptional contextA billing ledger, so Inspector reconciles logged hours against what was actually invoicedStandard bill rates and target utilisation by role, so leaks are priced, not just flaggedA note on which clients are fixed-fee vs time-and-materials, since leakage behaves differently for eachprojects-export.csvtimesheets.csvbilling-ledger.xlsx - 3
What Inspector creates
Inspector reconciles hours worked against hours billed across every engagement, isolates the workflow breakpoints where margin escapes, and puts an annual dollar figure on each. You get a ranked list of leaks, the recoverable-margin estimate, and the single highest-return fix, plus a note on any engagements it could not fully reconcile.
From Inspector: Reconciled projects-export.csv and timesheets.csv against billing-ledger.xlsx across 4 quarters.
$340KRecoverable annual margin3Workflow breakpoints found61%Actual utilisation vs 72% targetTop recoverable leaks3 breakpointsBreakpoint Annual leak Root cause Unbilled scope creep $164K Change requests worked but never added to the SOW on fixed-fee jobs Senior over-staffing $108K Principals logging hours on work a mid-level could bill Admin drag $68K Non-billable coordination averaging 6.2 hrs/person/week Utilisation by team4 teamsTeam Actual Target Gap Delivery A 58% 72% -14 pts, mostly between-project bench time Delivery B 67% 72% -5 pts, healthy "The single highest-return fix is a change-request gate on fixed-fee jobs, it recovers ~$164K with almost no disruption. Two engagements had timesheets but no billing records to reconcile against; want me to flag those, or draft the change-request workflow?"
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Follow-up prompts
Draft the change-request workflow
Inspector can turn the biggest leak into the process that closes it, the exact gate that stops scope creep going unbilled on fixed-fee work.
Draft a change-request workflow that closes the $164K scope-creep leak: when it triggers, who approves, and how it ties back to the SOW before hours are logged. Keep it lightweight enough that delivery leads will actually use it.
Model the ops team you could rebuild
The recovered margin is enough to reinvest. Ask Inspector to model what the $340K funds against your current gaps.
Model how the $340K recovered margin could be reinvested: options across new hires, tooling, and a delivery-ops function. Show headcount and payback for each.
Track leakage quarterly
Save the setup and re-run it each quarter so you can prove the fixes stuck and catch new leaks as they open.
Save this as a runbook called "margin-leak-scan", then re-run it each quarter against the latest exports and show me which leaks shrank and which are new.
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Tips and troubleshooting
The billing ledger is what turns patterns into dollars
Timesheets alone show you where hours went; the billing ledger shows you which of those hours turned into revenue. Connecting both is what lets Inspector price a leak instead of merely describing an inefficiency.
Separate fixed-fee from time-and-materials
Leakage on fixed-fee work hides as unbilled scope creep; on T&M it hides as write-offs and bench time. Tell Inspector which is which and it will hunt for the right failure mode on each engagement rather than averaging them together.
Rank by ease of fix, not just size
The largest leak is not always the one to fix first. Inspector ranks recoverable margin against disruption, so you start with the change that pays back fastest and keeps delivery leads on side.
Ready to try it yourself?
Connect your project, staffing, and billing data, and get the specific workflow breakpoints leaking margin, each with a dollar figure and a fix ranked by effort.
Run Inspector