Silver Sea AI & Automation
Power BI

Clear answers from the data your firm already has.

Dashboards on CCH Axcess, Practice CS, Karbon, and QuickBooks data, built for the decisions partners make: which clients and industries are profitable, where WIP is drifting from budget, who has capacity. The transactions behind any number are one click away.

CCH Axcess DAUPractice CSKarbonQuickBooks OnlinePaylocityFirm overviewClient profitabilityStaff productivityAR & WIP agingPlain-English Q&APower BIdata model
What do you need to see?

Three places firms usually start

01

Reports partners don't open?

Built for the person who runs them, not the one who decides. The questions a partner asks, which clients pay, which industry is growing, where WIP is drifting, take three exports and a pivot table to answer.

See how we help
02

No idea who's busy and who's behind?

Hours, budgets, and workload live in different systems, so capacity is a guess until someone misses a deadline.

See how we help
03

Numbers that don't reconcile, or refreshes that fail?

A dashboard nobody trusts is worse than no dashboard. The data underneath has to be right, and current.

See how we help
01 · Reports partners don't open

Every common firm KPI in one place

Slice by date range, business unit, department, or partner. Compare fiscal and calendar years. Click any number to see the transactions behind it.

Pre-built templates, live in days

  • Firm KPI overview
  • Client profitability
  • Staff productivity
  • Unbilled WIP aging
  • Aged accounts receivable
  • Workstream project analysis
  • Staff productivity goals

A quick report from a template is usually live in a few days. A mid-size dashboard usually takes two to three weeks, and that time goes into the customization: your realization formula, your offices, your partner groupings.

Client analysis

KPI activity, billing status, and revenue by client, sliceable by office, service line, and partner.

Staff analysis

Staffing KPIs, individual performance, budget versus actual hours, overtime alerts.

Open AR summary

Billing activity and AR balances by office and client, aged for a collections conversation.

Revenue and unbilled WIP

WIP aging by partner and engagement, with stale work flagged before it becomes a write-off.

Case studies from this stage

  • Dashboard 4 CPABroken links gone; partners and billers each get a workspace scoped to what they're allowed to see.
    Problem
    Dashboard links broke whenever reports changed, and nothing separated what partners see firm-wide from what billers should see.
    Built
    A Power BI suite with a stable published link, role-based partner and biller workspaces, and one consolidated staff dashboard.
    Result
    Broken links gone; partners and billers each get a workspace scoped to what they're allowed to see.
  • Cash-cycle and capacity dashboards on Practice CSThe firm saw its cash cycle for the first time: 58 days from time entry to invoice, plus 44 days to collect.
    Problem
    Practice CS data wasn't surfaced anywhere staff could act on it: no view of WIP aging, realization, capacity, or budget vs. actual hours.
    Built
    A Power BI suite for client KPIs, AR and unbilled WIP, staff budgets and billable hours, and a project view for capacity and deadlines.
    Result
    The firm saw its cash cycle for the first time: 58 days from time entry to invoice, plus 44 days to collect.
  • Power BI on Karbon and QuickBooks dataAbout 1–1.5 FTE of admin work automated; revenue view moved from weekly and manual to daily and automatic.
    Problem
    No daily visibility into revenue and cost, and roughly 1–1.5 FTE of admin work (reminders, timesheet reports, workload views) done by hand.
    Built
    A Power Automate layer for reminders, timesheet reports, and workload dashboards, plus a QuickBooks-linked dashboard with daily revenue and cost.
    Result
    About 1–1.5 FTE of admin work automated; revenue view moved from weekly and manual to daily and automatic.
02 · No idea who's busy and who's behind

Capacity you can plan around

Hours, budgets, and workload by person, built from the time data you already collect.

  • Billable vs. non-billable hours and remaining project budgets, by staff member.
  • Utilization from several time sources in one view, so discrepancies per employee are visible.
  • Tax-return workload by person: ready, overdue, and in progress, against last year's pace.
  • PTO and overtime by employee type, connected to payroll.

Case studies from this stage

  • Capacity dashboard for a small remote firmA prioritized work queue per staff member. The firm's target at scoping was about 80% less clutter in that queue.
    Problem
    The practice-management platform rolled job hours up weekly, which hid task-level detail and made capacity planning unreliable.
    Built
    A custom Power BI dashboard, delivered fast on a fixed fee, showing hours, remaining budgets, and task priority per person.
    Result
    A prioritized work queue per staff member. The firm's target at scoping was about 80% less clutter in that queue.
  • Utilization from three time sources in one viewThree siloed spreadsheets replaced by one view for reconciling time entries by employee and date.
    Problem
    Time-tracking data lived in three disconnected spreadsheets, so discrepancies per employee were hard to see or discuss.
    Built
    First a consolidated pivot view, then an automated Power BI time-entry dashboard with the firm's own realization calculation and plain-English Q&A.
    Result
    Three siloed spreadsheets replaced by one view for reconciling time entries by employee and date.
  • Tax-return workload by staff memberReady tasks, overdue items, and staff-level realization in one place instead of pieced together by hand.
    Problem
    No view of tax-return workload by staff member, and no way to compare completion pace with the prior year.
    Built
    A Power BI dashboard of ready tasks by staff, with executive and detail views, budget-hours monitoring, and prior-year comparison, on a fixed budget.
    Result
    Ready tasks, overdue items, and staff-level realization in one place instead of pieced together by hand.
  • PTO and overtime reporting for a payroll changeOne accurate report for the new payroll cycle, replacing manual reconciliation across pay types.
    Problem
    The firm was moving to biweekly payroll and had no reliable way to report PTO and overtime by employee type.
    Built
    A Power BI payroll reporting system integrated with Paylocity: PTO for salaried staff at a fixed 80 hours per period, overtime for hourly staff.
    Result
    One accurate report for the new payroll cycle, replacing manual reconciliation across pay types.
Ask in plain English

“Which clients went unprofitable this year?”

Power BI's Q&A layer, configured on your data model with your terminology, lets a partner type a question and get a chart. Included in every dashboard we build.

03 · Numbers that don't reconcile, or refreshes that fail

Dashboards the partners can trust

Most dashboard projects fail on the data underneath, not the charts. We fix that first.

Numbers that reconcile

  • WIP and AR reconciled across offices and systems every month.
  • Vendor invoices matched to timesheets automatically, with the exceptions flagged.

Refreshes that don't fail

  • Refresh failures caught and reported before partners notice.
  • Credentials that don't expire the reporting, and a permissions process that scales.

Case studies from this stage

  • WIP and AR reconciliation after a mergerSurfaced a $230,000 AR discrepancy and an $868,000-vs-$5 million WIP reporting mismatch that no report had shown.
    Problem
    After a merger, the firm couldn't reconcile WIP and AR balances across offices. The existing reports hid the gaps.
    Built
    A WIP/AR reconciliation analysis on DAU data and a monthly reconciliation workflow.
    Result
    Surfaced a $230,000 AR discrepancy and an $868,000-vs-$5 million WIP reporting mismatch that no report had shown.
  • Invoice-to-timesheet reconciliation across vendorsManual PDF reconciliation replaced by an automated match-and-flag process.
    Problem
    Reconciling invoices and timesheets across six staffing subcontractors meant pulling data out of PDFs, with mismatched contract IDs and staff names.
    Built
    A Python reconciliation workflow fed by a drop folder, with mapping logic across vendors, piloted on one vendor before rollout.
    Result
    Manual PDF reconciliation replaced by an automated match-and-flag process.
  • DAU monitoring and Power BI infrastructureCredential expiry removed as a single point of failure.
    Problem
    Reporting on the Data Axcess Utility relied on credentials that expired every 60–90 days, causing repeated refresh outages.
    Built
    A move to centrally managed infrastructure, a ticketing process for Power BI permissions, and a row-level security plan.
    Result
    Credential expiry removed as a single point of failure.
  • AR reminders and data clean-upIdentified $53,000–$54,000 in AR tied to inactive clients that reporting had been missing.
    Problem
    Inactive clients with outstanding AR, duplicate metadata, and overlapping staff fields were quietly distorting reporting.
    Built
    A structured clean-up pass across client, contact, and staff records, with a plan for an AI data-integrity agent to keep it clean.
    Result
    Identified $53,000–$54,000 in AR tied to inactive clients that reporting had been missing.
FAQ

Common questions

What data can the dashboards use?

CCH Axcess through the Data Axcess Utility, Practice CS, Karbon, QuickBooks Online, and payroll systems such as Paylocity. Firm KPIs sit on top. Client, staff, and AR detail sit underneath. Any number can be clicked through to the transactions behind it.

How long does a dashboard take?

It depends on scope. A quick report on data you already have usually takes a few days. A mid-size dashboard usually takes two to three weeks. Pre-built templates for firm KPIs, client profitability, staff productivity, WIP aging, and AR shorten the start. The time goes into fitting it to your firm: your realization formula, your offices, and your partner groupings.

Why do our Power BI refreshes keep failing?

A common cause with CCH Axcess is credentials that expire every 60 to 90 days, which breaks the refresh each time. We move the reporting to centrally managed infrastructure and add monitoring that reports a failed refresh before partners notice.

Do we need to install Power BI Desktop to see our dashboard?

No. People reading a report view it in the browser, which is what it is designed for. Power BI Desktop is the authoring tool. The person building the report needs it, and the people reading it do not.

What do we actually get out of a dashboard during tax season?

Visibility you can act on. You see which projects are overdue at a glance and adjust dates straight away. Over the season, short regular reviews show which steps keep causing trouble and are worth automating next. Run it through a full season before redesigning the underlying data, because the season tells you what you need.

Can we track quality issues in the reporting?

Yes, if the data is captured consistently. When staff log a short time entry against a quality-control task type with a note about the issue, it becomes reportable: every work item that had a quality issue, what it was, and what was done about it. It can be its own page or a toggle on the main dashboard.

Steven Duc Tran, CPA, CIA

See your own numbers on a dashboard.

Bring a recent WIP or AR report. We'll show you what it looks like as a dashboard and what it takes to get there.