Setting up Monitoring for a small firm — practical, not exhaustive

Monitoring is one of those features where “complete setup” is the enemy of “any setup.” A firm that tries to configure every metric for every client usually ends up with none configured, because the task feels too large. This guide is about the pragmatic approach: start with the clients that matter most, use the metrics you already trust, and expand from there.

Quick answer

For a firm with 30–80 clients, a practical monitoring setup covers: total time targets for fixed-fee clients, topic-level targets for services with separate pricing, and a weekly or monthly review habit. You do not need to configure every client on day one. Start with your top 20% by revenue.

Who does this

• Company Admins and Company Owners configure monitoring targets and run the firm-wide review.
• Company Members with Client Admin permission can view and update targets for their own clients.
• Requires the Monitoring app activated in Settings & Apps. Available on the Team plan and above.

Before you start — activate Monitoring

If Monitoring is not yet showing in your main navigation, activate it first:

1. Go to Settings & Apps.
2. Find the Monitoring app card and click to open it.
3. Click Activate.

Monitoring now appears in the main navigation menu.

Step 1 — Decide which clients to monitor first

You do not need to set up every client. Start with clients where service-level visibility actually matters:

• Fixed-fee clients — these are where margin monitoring matters most. If a fixed-fee client is taking 30% more hours than budgeted, you are losing money on them. Total time targets flag this immediately.
• High-revenue clients — a client who represents 10% of your revenue deserves more visibility than one who represents 0.5%.
• Recently repriced clients — if you recently changed a client’s fee, monitoring tells you whether the new price is holding up against actual work.

For an initial setup, pick 10–15 clients. You can add more over time once the habit is established.

Step 2 — Set total time targets

The simplest and most useful monitoring metric for most small firms is Total time — the total hours tracked against a client per month.

1. Open Monitoring from the main navigation.
2. Find a client in the list and click the edit icon on their row.
3. In the monitoring editor, select the current month using the period selector.
4. Under Total time, enter your target hours for this client per month.
5. Set a ± range. For example, if you expect 8 hours and a ±2 range, anything between 6 and 10 hours shows as On track. Work outside that window shows as Under or Over.
6. Click Save.

Once saved, this target carries forward automatically to future months. You only need to revisit it when the client’s service scope changes.

Where do you find the right target hours? Look at the last 3 months of tracked time for each client in Report > Time tab. The average gives you a reasonable baseline. See Reports — Time tab.

Step 3 — Add topic-level targets for services with separate pricing

If your firm prices certain services separately — payroll at a per-payslip rate, VAT at a fixed quarterly fee — topic-level monitoring adds useful granularity. You can see not just total hours but whether the time on each service type matches what you expected.

To use topic-based monitoring:

1. Go to Settings & Apps > Tasks > Topics.
2. Find the topics you want to monitor (for example, “Payroll” or “VAT”) and enable the Monitoring checkbox on each.
3. Return to the monitoring editor for a client and you will now see those topics available as monitoring columns.
4. Set a target for each relevant topic.

Start with your one or two highest-volume service types. Adding too many topic targets creates cognitive noise — every column that always shows green is a column you did not need.

See How to use topics for how topics work across the platform.

Step 4 — Do a bulk setup using Export/Import

If you need to set up targets for 20+ clients at once, the spreadsheet import is faster than editing each client manually:

1. Open Monitoring and click Export to Excel.
2. Fill in the target values in the spreadsheet for each client.
3. Click Import and upload the completed file.

This is the right tool for initial bulk setup. Use the editor for ongoing adjustments to individual clients. See How to use Monitoring for the full export/import process.

Building a review habit

Targets that are never reviewed are targets that are never acted on. The review habit is what makes monitoring valuable.

For a small firm, a monthly review at the start of each month takes about 20 minutes:

1. Open Monitoring and set the period to the previous month.
2. Filter by Status = Over. These are clients where work exceeded the target range. Is the overrun consistent? Should the fee be increased, or was this a one-time spike?
3. Filter by Status = Under. These clients had less time logged than expected. Did we simply do less work, or are there tasks that should have been done but weren’t?
4. Note any clients with persistently high overruns. These are your candidates for a pricing review. See Pricing conversations with data.

Common mistakes to avoid

Setting targets based on what you wish were true, not what actually happened

If a client is currently taking 12 hours per month and you set a target of 8 hours because that is what the contract says, the Monitoring view will always show red for that client. Use actual data to set realistic starting targets, then use monitoring to identify the gap — and then decide what to do about it.

Monitoring everything from day one

Ten well-maintained targets are more useful than 80 neglected ones. It is better to monitor your most important clients well than to have a Monitoring page that nobody looks at because the signal-to-noise ratio is too low.

Not updating targets when scope changes

Monitoring targets carry forward automatically, which is helpful — but it means you need to update them when a client’s service scope changes. When you renegotiate a contract, update the monitoring target in the same session. It takes 2 minutes and keeps your data reliable.