River
Y CombinatorBacked by Y Combinator
Log InStart Free
FREE TEMPLATE

Consulting Practice Metrics Template

Five sheets that report utilization on every denominator, split the rate to bank gap into three leaks, and date the first unsold week.

Edit with AIDownload (.docx + .csv)

Free download  ·  No account needed

What you get

Pack of 10 files: 5 documents, 5 spreadsheets

Consulting Practice Metrics Template
  • How the Numbers Are DefinedDocument
  • Capacity and UtilizationSpreadsheet
  • Realization by EngagementSpreadsheet
  • Revenue by Client and TypeSpreadsheet
  • Capacity ForecastSpreadsheet
  • Pipeline and Dated GapSpreadsheet
  • Where the Rate GoesDocument
  • Reading the Dated GapDocument
  • Operating Review NoteDocument
  • Target SettingDocument

Every practice dashboard reports utilization and none of them says what it divided by. The same 1,004 billed hours read 48 percent against the federal 2,087 hour work year, 54 percent against the hours left after leave and holiday, 58 percent against the hours actually worked, and 88 percent against delivery hours alone. Four true numbers, forty points apart, for one year. Every benchmark you have been measured against is unreadable until somebody names the divisor, so Capacity and Utilization carries all four.

Realization is the second number the category defines two ways, and each definition swallows the others. Rate realization is what you agreed against what you publish. Time realization is what you billed against what you worked. Collection realization is what arrived against what you invoiced, and on the cash method most independent practices use it is the only one of the three that counts as income. They multiply, so a 280 dollar card rate lands at 218.20 an hour on delivery time and 144.54 across every hour worked.

Coverage is a ratio and a ratio has no date, so a practice at 98 percent coverage still has a hole three weeks out. Capacity Forecast is one row per forward week and Pipeline and Dated Gap carries an earliest start week per opportunity, so the first short week arrives with a date beside it. Send River your time export, invoices and enquiry threads, or take the sheets blank. Client-facing work lives in the intake pack and the proposal template.

One year of hours, four honest answers, and the week it runs out

Every percentage recomputes from the hours and the invoices. The card rate is the only figure on any of these sheets that a person typed in.

Consulting Practice Metrics Template
RiverUtilization

Capacity and Utilization

Illustrative year for a fictional solo practice, Halloway Advisory.

PeriodAvailableWorkedBilledvs 2,087vs availablevs workedvs delivery
FY26 Q149644429614.2%59.7%66.7%93.1%
FY26 Q24083861868.9%45.6%48.2%83.0%
FY26 Q346444226212.6%56.5%59.3%88.5%
FY26 Q448745226012.5%53.4%57.5%85.5%
FY26 year1,8551,7241,00448.1%54.1%58.2%87.9%

Available hours are derived, not asserted. The published 2,087 hour work year, less 88 hours of public holiday and 144 hours of leave actually taken, which was 18 days against an entitlement of 25.

Q2 is not the bad quarter. Utilization against available hours fell to 45.6 percent because selling hours more than doubled to 96. Those hours bought the pipeline that filled Q3 and Q4, and the review note says so rather than explaining away a dip.

One year, four true numbers, 39.8 points apart. Report one alone and the reader supplies a denominator of their own.

RiverWhere the Rate Went

Realization by Engagement

One card rate of 280 dollars, six engagements, and the three leaks kept apart.

RefClientTypeRateTimeCollectTotalEffective
E-01Brennall FoodsFixed fee100%84.1%100%84.1%235.51
E-02Calderhouse GroupTime and materials100%97.8%100%97.8%273.73
E-03Pentworth MillsFixed fee80.0%100%100%80.0%224.00
E-04Ashgrove CareRetainer85.7%85.1%100%72.9%204.26
E-05Rendell SystemsProject100%85.5%60.0%51.3%143.68
E-06Wickham TradingFixed fee100%61.3%100%61.3%171.61
FY266 clients4 types93.8%87.9%94.5%77.9%218.20

Nothing went wrong on E-03. It was agreed at 224 in the proposal, in writing, by the practitioner. Full time realization, full collection, and it still gave up 10,976 dollars against the card. That is a pricing decision, not an accident, and it needs a different conversation from the rest.

The leaks rank, and not the way they feel. Unbilled hours cost 38,640 of card value, agreed discounts 17,376, and one disputed settlement 14,560.

Spread across every hour the practice consumed, including selling and admin, the same collected income is 144.54 an hour.

RiverThe Dated Gap

Capacity Forecast, read against the pipeline

Forward weeks from 6 April 2026, against a measured 9.4 week median sales cycle.

WeekCommencingCapacityContractedShortCumulativeWhat can reach it
W213 Apr242400Sold
W320 Apr242222Nothing
W427 Apr242046Nothing
W54 May2416814Nothing
W611 May24121226Nothing
W718 May24121238P-03 only
W825 May2481654P-03 only
W91 Jun2442074P-03 only
W108 Jun2402498Anything sold today

Coverage reads 98 percent. That is 259 weighted pipeline hours against the 264 needed across weeks 4 to 17. The ratio is healthy and the calendar is short in three weeks, because a ratio carries no date.

Twenty six hours are already decided. Weeks 3 to 6 sit inside the sales cycle with nothing in the pipeline able to start early enough, about 5,670 dollars at the effective delivery rate. The 48 short hours in weeks 7 to 9 rest on one verbal yes, five weeks old, with no order behind it.

Edit with AI

What's in the pack

01

Capacity and Utilization

Billed hours over four denominators on every row: the published work year, the hours left after leave and holiday, the hours actually worked, and delivery hours alone. Available hours are built from leave actually taken rather than from entitlement, because the two differ by a week most years.

02

Realization by Engagement

Rate, time and collection realization as three separate columns per engagement, their product, and the effective hourly rate that product produces against your card. One engagement can lose on all three for entirely different reasons.

03

Revenue by Client and Type

Income by client with how each one arrived and who they referred, then by engagement type with the effective rate each type earned. This is the sheet that changes what you sell, and the one that shows a referral chain resting on a single relationship. Turning the type that earns best into a fixed-scope offer is the productized service design pack.

04

Capacity Forecast

One row per forward week: contracted hours against delivery capacity, the shortfall, a running cumulative, and the named opportunities that could still reach that week. The first materially short week is a date, not a worry.

05

Pipeline and Dated Gap

Every live opportunity with an earliest start week set by the client's budget year, shutdown or notice period rather than by their enthusiasm, so coverage gets tested against the calendar. A paid assessment is the fastest thing to put into a short week, and that is the diagnostic assessment pack. Keeping the pipeline fed in the first place, especially from past clients before a busy quarter goes quiet on them, is the business development tracker.

06

How the Numbers Are Defined

Every denominator, formula and boundary written down once: what counts as a delivery hour, what a selling hour is, and how the median sales cycle gets measured from your own closed work rather than borrowed from a benchmark.

07

Where the Rate Goes

The card to bank gap split three ways with the card value of each leak beside it, so the biggest one gets the fix. In the worked year that is 38,640 dollars of unbilled hours, and no amount of rate card revision touches it. Rebuilding the card itself is the rate card pack.

08

Operating Review and Target Setting

A monthly review that opens on the forward calendar instead of last month, and a target model that sets next year from realization and available hours rather than from a revenue figure someone liked the look of.

How to use it

  1. 1

    Open in River, or take it blank

    Install the pack and hand River your records, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and fill them in yourself.

  2. 2

    Send the records

    A time tracker export, a folder of invoices, bank statements, the enquiry threads, a calendar export. Thin timesheets get delivery hours reconstructed from calendar and file activity, and those rows are marked as reconstructed.

  3. 3

    Set the denominators once

    Available hours get built from leave actually taken. Every utilization figure then recomputes on all four divisors, and the space rule stops any of them being reported on its own.

  4. 4

    Read the calendar forward

    The first short week gets a date, your own median sales cycle decides what can still reach it, and the hours nothing can reach get priced at your effective rate.

Frequently asked questions

Is this template free?

Yes. The download is Word documents and CSV sheets, no account and no card. Edit with AI is the optional half: River reads your time export, invoices and enquiry threads and fills the sheets before you look at them. Every other pack sits in the template library.

What format are the downloaded files?

Word (.docx) for the five documents and CSV (.csv) for the five sheets, zipped together. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open the sheets straight off the download, and the review notes open in Word or Pages. Nothing to convert, and no formula locked to one program.

My time records are incomplete. Does that break it?

That is the normal case, and it is why time realization is its own column. Where the timesheet is thin, delivery hours get reconstructed from calendar entries and file activity, and those rows are marked reconstructed so they never pass as recorded time. The 138 unbilled hours in the worked year were found that way. Per engagement, that rebuild is its own analysis.

Why 2,087 hours rather than 2,080?

Because 2,080 assumes a 364 day year. Averaged over the 28 year cycle the calendar takes to repeat there are four years of 262 workdays, seventeen of 261 and seven of 260, which is 2,087.143. Federal pay computation uses the rounded figure, and so does the gross column here.

Which utilization number should I actually report?

All four, or the one your reader already uses with the divisor written next to it. A lender comparing you against a salaried alternative wants collected income over every hour worked. Your own pricing wants billed over delivery hours. Those were 58.2 and 87.9 percent in the same year.

Does it read my accounting system?

It reads whatever the accounting system exports, which is usually a CSV of invoices and a bank statement. Nothing needs connecting, and the sheets stay readable without it. Rate and collection realization only need the invoice total, the collected total and the card rate.

Is this for my practice or for a client's numbers?

Yours. It runs the practice rather than an engagement, so it never scopes work or produces a client deliverable. Getting oriented in a client's management accounts is a separate diagnostic, and pricing a recommendation for their board is a separate build with its own value model behind it.

Sources

  1. OPMComputing Hourly Rates of Pay Using the 2,087-Hour Divisor (opens in a new tab)
  2. IRSPublication 538 (01/2022), Accounting Periods and Methods (opens in a new tab)
  3. Cornell Law School5 U.S. Code § 5504 — Biweekly pay periods; computation of pay (opens in a new tab)

Written by

Chandler Supple

Co-founder & CEO, River

Chandler has spent the last six years working in AI, building tools for millions of users and Fortune 100 companies. In 2025, he co-founded River to build a new kind of operating system for AI agents.

LinkedInGitHubX

Reviewed by

Brian Joseff, Co-founder, River

LinkedInX

Related workspaces

Consulting proposal template

Where a short week turns into priced days and a signed order.

Diagnostic assessment pack

The paid assessment that can start inside your own sales cycle.

More free templates

Consultant Associate Network Tracker

Free consultant associate network tracker: three documents and three sheets that compute each associate's own recheck cadence instead of one fixed schedule.

Consultant Restriction and Conflict Register

Free register for tracking your own client non-competes and non-solicits: every restriction dated from its trigger event, then cleared per opportunity.

Consulting Business Development Tracker

Free consulting business development tracker: three documents and three sheets that escalate past-client outreach before your calendar fills up.

Consulting Knowledge Management Template

Free knowledge library template: classify past deliverables as Background IP or Work Product, then test the rest against the real anonymization standard.

Find out which week runs out

Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or open this exact pack in River and let it build the denominators from your own records first.

Build my dashboard