Your inventory is people. Count it with a Function.
Two questions run a firm: who is free, and is this engagement making money. Both should be a read, not a weekly reconciliation.
The systems you already run, the objects your product declares, and the work your team gets back.
These marks name the kinds of system a source declaration reaches — a picture of the ecosystem, not a fixed menu, and nothing here implies a partnership.
Retire the reconciliation. Keep the definition.
The staffing sheet, as a query
Who is free next month becomes a Function over roles, assignments and booked time — not a tab.
Margin with its evidence
A Function returns the engagement’s margin and the time entries, rates and invoices that produced it.
Staffing decisions leave a record
Assigning a consultant or extending a phase is an Action with declared effects, reviewable before it applies.
What teams build. On day one.
Four places this work turns into declared objects, governed reads, and reviewed changes.
Who is free
Availability across roles, skills and rolloff dates in one read, instead of three partners forwarding each other the same tab.
Engagement margin
Realisation is declared once as a Function over booked time, rates and write-offs. Every practice reads that definition rather than its own version.
Change request
A scope change is a reviewed Action whose plan shows the effect on budget, dates and staffing before a partner approves it.
Billing prep
The pre-bill pack becomes a Function: approved time, expenses and milestones for the period, each line traceable to the entry behind it.
How it runs. End to end.
The same path every product takes: connect what exists, declare what it means, then publish the reads and the changes.
- 01
Connect time, resourcing and billing
Those systems keep owning their data and nothing here writes back into them. Each is copied in on the interval your firm sets, so any figure can name the pull it came from.
- 02
Declare the firm’s engagement model
Client, engagement, phase, role, consultant, time entry, invoice — and the links between them — written down once in product source your firm reviews and owns.
- 03
Publish the definitions and the decisions
Utilisation, realisation and margin become named Functions. Staffing, scope changes and write-offs become Actions whose review rules match how your partners already sign off.
- 04
Let agents assemble, people decide
An agent can draft the Monday delivery summary through the same Functions a manager reads, and can change an engagement only through the same reviewed Actions. It carries no authority the partner who delegated to it lacks.
Common questions.
Not fully, and forcing it produces one object type with thirty optional fields nobody fills in. Declare what every practice shares — client, engagement, role, time, invoice — and let the differences live in properties and in each practice’s own Functions. Where two practices disagree about what an engagement even is, declare two object types instead of one that satisfies neither.
No. Consultants keep booking time where they book it today and Bijection only reads it. What changes is that utilisation, margin and availability all come from one written-down definition, and correcting an entry crosses an Action that records who changed what.
Each deployment is an isolated environment with its own database, storage and identity directory rather than a partition inside somebody else’s. What a person or an agent may discover and read is declared in reviewed product source, so an ethical wall is something you can point at instead of something an administrator remembers. The confidentiality terms in your client contracts remain yours to meet.
Bring us a process.
We'll build it with you.
A business process, the systems it touches, and the rules it needs to follow.