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Practice Management
Track time, manage jobs, and oversee your firm's daily operations.
Practice Management is the operational core of Accupe: the work your firm sells, who is doing it, and whether it made money. A job is the top-level piece of billable work, a VAT return, an audit, a payroll run, with a status, an assignee, a due date and optionally a recurrence pattern and budgeted hours. Tasks, time entries and profitability figures all hang off jobs.
Workflow templates turn a recurring engagement into a reusable blueprint, creating the job and its ordered tasks in a single step. Time reaches your timesheet through a shared timer session that survives moving between pages, through a weekly grid, and through a review flow that moves entries from logged to submitted, approved and billed. The Profitability report then answers whether the engagement was worth taking on once your team’s time is paid for.
Jobs are the spine, and everything hangs off them
A job carries a title, a client, one of five statuses, an assignee, a due date, a category, a fee in your firm’s currency, and optionally budgeted hours and a recurrence pattern. Tasks, time entries and every profitability figure attach to jobs, which is why an inaccurate job list quietly degrades three other screens at once.
The five statuses are Not Started, In Progress, In Review, Complete and Cancelled. Only the first four appear as quick filter pills or as bulk “Move to” targets; Cancelled is available from the per-row dropdown. Status and assignee both save inline from the All Jobs table without opening anything, a double-click anywhere on a row other than the title opens the full Edit Job modal with a recent activity panel beside it, and clicking the title instead opens that job’s read-only detail page. Saved-view chips above the table jump you to My jobs, Due this week, Overdue, Unassigned or High value, and the five stat tiles recalculate against whatever combination of search, view and status filter is currently applied.
Recurrence is set on the job itself, as monthly, quarterly or annual. Accupe spawns a fresh occurrence each cycle starting from the due date you set, and the template job is never assigned to itself. If you choose a recurrence without a due date the modal stops you, because that first date is the first occurrence.
Workflow templates, and the four ways time gets logged
A workflow template is a blueprint: a name, a category, a budgeted hours figure and an ordered list of tasks, each with its own day offset from the job start and its own priority. Applying one creates exactly one job and one task per template task in a single step. The job’s own due date is derived from the latest task offset rather than typed in, and the single assignee you pick at apply time is applied to every task the template creates.
Time reaches your timesheet four ways: the shared timer, the weekly grid, a manual Log Time entry, and AI Assist drafts. The timer runs on one shared session rather than a per-page one, so you can start it from a job row’s play button and stop it from the top-bar pill or the sidebar panel on a completely different screen. A session under 60 seconds saves nothing at all. A session of 60 seconds or more saves automatically at status Logged, and a timer started from a job row is linked to that job, which is what makes it count towards the Profitability report.
Entries then move through a review lifecycle: Draft (an AI suggestion you have not accepted), Logged, Submitted, Approved and Billed. Staff submit; admins and managers approve, or reject back to Logged. Approved and Billed entries are read-only to everyone. In the weekly grid you can type hours either as a decimal (1.5) or as hours and minutes (1:30), and entering 0 removes that day’s entry.
What the Profitability report is actually telling you
Margin is fee minus logged hours multiplied by staff hourly cost, calculated per job. Only timesheet entries linked to a job count towards it, so anything logged against Internal Admin is excluded from every job’s totals. The hourly cost is taken from the individual’s own rate if one is set, then your firm’s default rate, and then zero.
That third fallback is the one to watch. If nobody at your firm has an hourly cost rate and there is no firm-wide default, the report shows a “No staff cost rates set yet” banner, and every margin on the page is treating your team’s time as free, which overstates the profitability of every engagement on it. Add the rates from Settings, Team before you take these numbers into a pricing conversation. The four stat cards at the top use the same thresholds as the rows: green at 30 per cent margin or above, amber between 10 and 30, red below 10. A job with a zero fee shows a dash rather than a percentage, because one cannot be calculated.
What people come here to do
- Create, edit and recur a job. The five statuses, inline editing, saved views, bulk actions, deletion and the keyboard shortcuts.
- Build a recurring engagement once. A reusable blueprint of a job and its ordered tasks, applied in one step with calculated due dates.
- Time a piece of work. One shared timer session across pages, four places to control it, and what happens when you stop.
- Log and approve a week of time. The weekly grid, manual entries, AI drafts, and the Logged to Submitted to Approved to Billed lifecycle.
- Check whether an engagement paid. How margin is calculated, where the cost rates come from, and what a missing rate does to the numbers.
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Things that catch people out
Only job-linked time counts towards profitability
Time logged against Internal Admin, or any entry with no job attached, is excluded from every job’s hours and cost. A job that looks unusually profitable is often one whose time was logged loosely rather than against the job itself.
The stopwatch on All Tasks saves nothing
The play and pause icon beside an individual task is an on-screen stopwatch for your own reference while you work. To record billable time that reaches Timesheets and Profitability, use the Timer Widget, the top-bar pill, the sidebar panel, or a job row’s Start Timer button.
Sessions under a minute are discarded
Stopping a timer that has run for less than 60 seconds shows “Timer stopped. Sessions under 1 minute are not saved to timesheets.” and writes nothing, wherever you stopped it from.
The search box and status pills do not touch the weekly grid
They filter the List view only. The Weekly Grid always shows every entry for the week you are viewing, within whichever Personal or Company scope is active, so a search term applied there has no visible effect.
A template applies one assignee to every task it creates
There is no per-task owner at apply time. If a template’s tasks genuinely need different people, apply it and then reassign the individual tasks from All Tasks.
Template categories and job categories are different lists
Strategy and Finance exist only as job categories. Advisory exists only as a template category. Expect a mismatch if you later try to line a template up against the job it created.
Where to go next
- Smart Board. The same jobs arranged as a Kanban board, with drag-to-change-status, task badges and keyboard moves.
- Calendar & Deadlines. Every open job and task with a due date, shifted onto the next working day for your region’s holiday calendar.
- Reports & Invoicing. A completed job carrying a fee is one of the four routes to raising an invoice.