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Demo & discovery
60-min demo of the standard solution. We show the daily flow of a consultant, a project manager, a managing director. You tell us which contract models you have and which reports you need.
Solution · PSA
For IT service firms, consultancies, and agencies with 5 to 200 staff. Time tracking, travel, expenses, billing, resource utilization, project profitability — built lean, hardened in our own practice. We use it ourselves, every day.
The problem
In most IT service firms, consultancies, and agencies with fewer than 100 staff, the setup looks similar: one tool for hours (often a lean cloud solution), one for accounting (DATEV or lexoffice), and an Excel sheet for project profitability. Anyone who wants to know whether a project actually makes money collects data from three systems — usually only weeks after the work itself.
Microsoft Project Operations solves this in standard — but for service firms with 5 to 50 staff the tool is oversized and expensive. So we asked ourselves: what are the 80% of requirements that every smaller service firm has? And how do we build that lean on Microsoft Dynamics 365, without the Project Operations license footprint?
The result is a model-driven app that does exactly that: capture hours (on desktop and mobile), bill travel and expenses, hand invoices over to DATEV or Business Central, show resource utilization in real time, calculate project profitability per project and per customer. We've been using it for years in our own consulting business. What wouldn't work for us, we wouldn't sell.
Capabilities
Weekly view in the browser, quick-entry via Power Apps mobile on iOS and Android. Offline-capable — hours can be captured without a network and synced later. Mandatory fields configurable per project.
Travel record with origin-destination, duration, kilometers, costs. Expenses with receipt photo directly from the mobile app. Flat rates per BMF (German tax) rates or your own rates per country. Approval workflow by supervisors.
Invoice run monthly or ad hoc. Different contract models: fixed price, time-and-materials, service flat rate, mixed. Handoff of posting data to DATEV, lexoffice, Microsoft Business Central, or SAP via interface.
Per employee and per role: planned hours vs. recorded hours, in real time across all active projects. Early-warning indicator when utilization drops below 70% or rises above 95%.
Revenue minus internal personnel costs, travel costs, expenses, subcontractor costs. Visible per project in real time. Plan vs. actual comparison, burn-rate forecast for the end-of-project result.
Recurring project types (e.g., standard implementation, discovery workshop) with predefined cost and phase scheme. New project created from template — saves 80% of setup time.
Maintenance and support contracts with hour quota, automatic billing, consumption tracking, quota reset on contract date. Includes dunning logic on quota overrun.
Standard dashboards: utilization, profitability, forecast, top customers, top projects. Extensible with your own Power BI reports. The data foundation is Dataverse — direct access from Excel or Fabric possible.
Eat your own dogfood
All arades advisory and implementation projects are handled in this solution. Time tracking, travel, expenses, billing, utilization — everything runs here. What annoys us, we change; what doesn't work for us doesn't make it into the standard.
This has two sober consequences: first, we know every click path in daily use — we know where frustration arises and where there's room for improvement. Second, we have a strong self-interest in keeping the platform stable and fast — because we're affected ourselves when it isn't.
The solution isn't a marketing attempt to sell something we built for a client three years ago. It's the operational software with which we run our own business.
Approach
60-min demo of the standard solution. We show the daily flow of a consultant, a project manager, a managing director. You tell us which contract models you have and which reports you need.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment, deploy the standard app, configure contract models and hourly rates, build the accounting interface, adapt the mobile app layout to your specifics.
Training on real data in the test system. Pilot phase with one team over 4 weeks. Corrections and fine-tuning based on real usage — before the system is rolled out company-wide.
Production go-live with three weeks of hypercare. Then Application Care — release-wave adjustments, optimization conversations per quarter, support for new requirements.
Related
FAQ
Project Operations is the Microsoft standard solution — very powerful, but for many mid-sized companies and service firms under 50 staff oversized and expensive. Our solution covers the typical 80% requirements: hours, travel, expenses, billing, utilization, profitability. Lean, faster to adopt, cheaper in license footprint.
Yes. Via the Microsoft Power Apps mobile app on iOS and Android. Enter hours, capture expenses with a receipt photo, close out trips — even offline, with later synchronization. In daily use, often faster than the browser variant.
Yes. Fixed price, time-and-materials, service flat rates with hour quota, mixed contracts. Hourly rates per customer, per employee, or per role. Multi-year contracts with an annual adjustment formula — e.g., indexed to a collective wage agreement.
Interfaces to DATEV, lexoffice, Microsoft Business Central, SAP. Outgoing invoices are handed over ready to post. Travel costs and expenses can — with GoBD-compliant receipt archiving — also be passed through.
Revenue minus personnel costs (internal hourly rates), travel costs, expenses, subcontractor costs. Visible in real time per project. Standard reports show plan vs. actual and forecast the end-of-project result based on the current burn rate.
Typically 6 to 12 weeks — depending on the complexity of your contract models and the accounting connection. The leanest variant (hours + expenses + DATEV) can be productive in 4 weeks.
Yes. All arades projects, hours, travel, and expenses have been running on exactly this solution for years. Eat your own dogfood — what doesn't work for us, we wouldn't want to sell.
60-min live demo
We show you the solution in our own productive environment. No sandbox setup, no made-up data — the real daily use. Bring management, project leadership, and accounting, and all three will see the same thing.
Strategy background · arades topic page
Why we consistently build all our apps and recommendations on a single data foundation — and when the island solution is still the better answer. 2,500 words on architecture, migration paths, and honest boundaries.
Read the topic page →