Drop the spreadsheet. How Vértiz & Asociados recovered the hours they were already working, but not billing.
An accounting outsourcing, payroll and audit firm with 200+ professionals turned its fragmented operation into a single control panel — without changing its business model or its team structure.
Operating at the pace of the close, without losing sight of the business
The consulting accounting segment has a particularity: it works against non-negotiable legal deadlines. Monthly tax filings, balance sheet closings, annual income tax adjustments, and audit working papers don't wait. The operation revolves around the fiscal calendar.
The firm had a clear snapshot of the problem at each fiscal close: seniors were absorbing work that could have been delegated, because there was no visibility into who had available capacity.
"During peak closings, seniors were absorbing work that could have been delegated, and trainees were entering the busy season without the exposure they needed to operate on their own."
How much of the team's time is actually spent on billable clients versus internal tasks, training, emails, and coordination meetings?
How can we project team capacity for the predictable peaks of March, April, and year-end closings, avoiding overload on seniors and underutilization on trainees?
Which accounts are consuming more hours than contemplated in the fee, and which could absorb more work without stressing the team?
How do we identify the areas or regional offices where non-billable effort is concentrated, and understand whether it responds to a service model or to an avoidable time leak?
On top of this, there was a qualitative factor: the professional pyramid of the segment (Trainee → Junior → Semi Senior → Senior → Manager) requires constant decisions about what type of task is assigned to what level. Without granular visibility, Seniors ended up absorbing work that a Semi Senior could have done, and Trainees did not accumulate the exposure hours their careers required.
From Excel to a control panel
Vértiz & Asociados implemented COR as its single system of record for time tracking and operational management, integrating it from day one into its workflow: every professional logs their time against client, project, fee, and task.
The rollout followed a deliberate logic: first, time tracking on large project stages without forced granularity, so the team could build the habit without friction. Only in the second phase was the level of detail per task and client activated. That phased process is what explains the 91% adoption: it wasn't a migration, it was a gradual onboarding.
Utilization dashboards by area and office
For the first time, partners and team leaders could see in real time how much of the team's effort was translating into billable hours. The system opened up the billable ratio by area (Payroll, Audit, Tax, BPO), by office, and by seniority level, revealing where the operating model was healthy and where there was room to optimize. Time tracking also met the documentation requirements of the professional board and ISA/NIA standards, shifting from a manual process to an automatic output.
Capacity planning anchored to the fiscal calendar
The resource planning module allowed Vértiz to stop reacting to peaks and start anticipating them. With four months of operating data, the team projected the demand spread between valley and peak months (+25% average) and planned hiring and rotations in advance. Payroll and Audit stopped managing peaks with overtime and started managing them with redistribution.
Profitability analysis by account and by fee
The integration between time tracking, assigned fee, and cost of hours enabled an analysis that previously required long meetings with finance: which clients are profitable, which consume more hours than budgeted, and where to renegotiate terms with data in hand. For a firm with more than 700 active accounts, this was decisive in focusing the commercial conversation on the accounts that most impact the bottom line.
Map of internal effort and revenue leakage
Distinguishing between "billable client" and "billable task" allowed the firm to quantify something it had long suspected: within accounts that were being billed, significant hours were being assigned to internal tasks. That gap — internal revenue leakage — became a KPI that the operating committee began to track month over month.
A more predictable operation, more profitable and better distributed
We used to live in a world where we discussed account profitability with spreadsheets we threw together right before the partners' meeting. Today we log into COR and the conversation changes: we no longer discuss what happened, we discuss what to do. The data is there, it's current, and the entire team — from Trainee to partner — looks at the same information.
When the fiscal calendar stops being an emergency
Vértiz & Asociados shows that the first step is not to transform the firm — it's to see what's already happening. Hours that were being worked but not billed. Overloaded seniors who could have delegated. Clients that grew without a fee adjustment. All of that information existed: it was scattered across spreadsheets, in the team's memory, in month-end closing emails.
COR didn't change Vértiz's business model — it made it readable.
Without changing its business model or team structure, the firm made every logged hour become a signal: a signal of workload, of profitability, of opportunity. For a consulting firm that operates against non-negotiable legal deadlines and with a broad account portfolio, that visibility is not a nice to have — it's what allows you to scale predictably, without burning out the team and without leaving revenue on the table.
Vértiz & Asociados is a fictional firm. The data, metrics, and situations described are based on real cases of COR clients in the audit and accounting outsourcing segment, whose names are withheld at their request.
Your accounting firm deserves the same rigor you demand from your clients.
Let's talk about how COR can apply to your operation.