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Four operating models we understand well enough to be useful.
Plenty of vendors publish forty industry pages by putting a different noun above the same feature list. These are the four operating models BetterWrk can credibly support today. If yours is not here, a Trail Map is still the right first step — it just will not come with a pre-written story.
Professional services
Sell the work, deliver the work, bill the work — from the same record.
The end-to-end workflow is lead → proposal → agreement → resourcing → delivery → time → invoice → cash. Most firms run it across a CRM, an e-signature tool, a resourcing spreadsheet, a timesheet system and an accounting package that agree with each other once a month, badly.
Where it usually hurts
- Time recorded days late, so invoicing waits and margin is discovered afterwards
- What was promised during the sale is not visible to the team delivering it
- Resourcing decisions made from a spreadsheet nobody else can see
- Month end reassembles the invoice from memory and email
Typical shape
- Start with
- Sign, CRM, Automate and Finance — the contract-to-cash spine.
- Add
- People and Payroll once the cost side needs to meet the revenue side.
- Usually configured
- Rate cards, engagement types, approval thresholds and utilisation reporting.
- Often built
- A commercial structure specific to the firm — retainer, panel or success-based.
- ProcessScout finds
- The delivery-to-invoice gap, and the approvals that add days without adding control.
Staffing and workforce businesses
Two customers, one operating model.
A staffing business sells to clients and manages workers, and the two sides have to reconcile every single week. The workflow is vacancy → candidate → placement → assignment → timesheet → pay and bill → margin.
Where it usually hurts
- Pay and bill run from different data, so margin is a monthly surprise
- Compliance documents chased manually per worker, per assignment
- Timesheet approval sits with a client contact who has no reason to hurry
- Multi-country or multi-entity placements handled by exception, every time
Typical shape
- Start with
- People, Payroll and Automate — the assignment-to-pay spine.
- Add
- CRM, Sign and Finance to close pay-and-bill into one reconciliation.
- Usually configured
- Assignment types, compliance requirements, timesheet approval and margin reporting.
- Often built
- Multi-assignment worker structures and sector-specific pay rules.
- ProcessScout finds
- Where timesheet chasing consumes a full-time role that nobody budgeted for.
Field and multi-location services
The work happens away from the system.
Job → schedule → dispatch → completion → evidence → invoice → payment. The hard part is that the person doing the work is not sitting at a desk, so evidence arrives late, incomplete, or as a photograph in a message thread.
Where it usually hurts
- Completion evidence arrives days after the job, delaying every invoice behind it
- Each location runs a slightly different process, and nobody knows which is best
- Scheduling is a whiteboard problem solved by one experienced person
- Compliance and certification records live in a filing cabinet somewhere
Typical shape
- Start with
- Automate and Finance — job-to-cash, with evidence captured at the job.
- Add
- People and Payroll where the workforce is directly employed.
- Usually configured
- Job types, completion requirements, location structures and escalation rules.
- Often built
- Dispatch or scheduling logic specific to the operation.
- ProcessScout finds
- Which location’s variation is actually better, and whether it should become the standard.
Private equity and portfolio operations
One operating model across the portfolio, without forcing every company to be identical.
The usual portfolio choice is bad in both directions. Let every company keep its own systems and you get no comparability, no shared leverage and a diligence problem at exit. Force a single template and you break the operating businesses that made them worth buying.
Portfolio Trail Maps
The same diagnostic run across companies, producing findings you can actually compare. Where the same friction appears three times, it is a portfolio programme rather than three projects.
A common template
One operating model, one chart of accounts structure, one set of controls, deployed as a starting point rather than a straitjacket.
Company-specific gates
Each operating company keeps what genuinely differentiates it, isolated behind feature gates. Autonomy where it matters, standardisation where it does not.
Cross-company benchmarking
Because the underlying records are canonical, comparing days-to-invoice across six companies is a query rather than a data project.
Feature reuse
Something built for one company can be offered to the others, with their agreement. The second deployment costs far less than the first.
Repeatable launches
Each launch is faster than the last, because the template, the integrations and the acceptance tests already exist.
Standard controls
Approval authority, segregation of duties and audit trail applied consistently, which matters at both ends of a hold period.
Shared services
Where a portfolio centralises finance or HR, the operating model supports it without every company losing its own view.
Portfolio licensing
A portfolio Operating Licence under Buy + Assure, so adding a company is a deployment decision rather than a procurement cycle.
Multi-entity operations
If you run more than one legal entity, the difficulty is structural.
Multi-entity is less an industry than a condition, and it makes everything harder: permissions, approval authority, intercompany, consolidated reporting, payroll in more than one jurisdiction, and the question of who is allowed to see what.
It is handled in the operating model rather than bolted on, which is why it appears here rather than as a feature bullet.
- Entity structure and hierarchy as first-class parts of the canonical model
- Permissions and approval authority scoped by entity as well as by role
- Payroll per jurisdiction, with cost landing against the right entity
- Intercompany relationships and consolidated reporting without a spreadsheet
- Data residency selected per environment where regulation requires it
Start with your workflow, not our industry page.
A Trail Map documents how the work actually moves through your operation. That is a better foundation for a decision than any sector story we could write.