Professional services operations where every scope change, staffing call and milestone has an owner — with your clients too

Mi Retail is an operations center for consultancies, agencies, law firms and accounting firms. It does not replace the tools that track hours, rates and projects; it manages the human work that appears around every engagement. A client request, a scope change, a staffing need, a partner approval, a deliverable review or a billing milestone becomes an Operational Work Item with an owner, a state, a due date and evidence. Each person sees the part that is theirs: consultants their assigned work, account owners the client requests, partners the approvals and finance the milestones ready to bill. The domain work — statements of work, timesheets, staffing plans, invoices — runs in StoneOS apps or in the systems you already use.

No. Your professional services automation or time-tracking tool stays the system of record for timesheets, rates, resource plans, utilization and project billing, and Mi Retail never keeps a second copy of them. Mi Retail covers what those tools were not built for: the work that happens before and around the record. A client asking for more scope, an account owner estimating impact, a partner signing off, a client countersigning, a consultant waiting on access — those moments become work items that move between people until they are resolved. Keep your PSA; Mi Retail takes over where the work leaves it and records who decided what, and when.

The client sends the scope change from its own Mi Retail, and it lands in the firm’s intake as a derived work item. The account owner reviews the impact on hours, staffing and dates against the statement of work and attaches a revised estimate. The engagement partner approves the change order from the same case, with the reason recorded. Mi Retail then sends the change order back to the client as a derived work item for countersignature. Only when it is countersigned do the delivery work items start, and when the client accepts the milestone, finance receives a billing request with the change order and the acceptance attached. Every step has an owner and a state.

For work that moves between organizations, yes: both the firm and the client need their own organization on Mi Retail. The client picks your firm from the directory and sends a request; it lands in your intake queue and you assign it inside your own teams. Each side keeps its privacy. The client follows the state, due date and result of what it asked for, but not your internal staffing discussions, margins or notes, and you do not see the client’s internal projects. When you send a change order or a deliverable for approval, it arrives in the client’s own queue the same way. That is how a scope change stops living in a reply chain that neither side can audit.

A staffing need is a request work item, not a message to whoever manages the bench. The engagement lead describes the role, skills, dates and allocation, and the request lands in the resourcing team’s queue with a due date. Resource managers see every open request by priority, propose people and, when a practice lead has to release someone from another engagement, that release becomes an approval with its reason. If nobody with the right skills is available, the request is blocked with that reason, so the engagement lead knows exactly why. The staffing plan itself lives in the resource tool; Mi Retail makes sure the requests behind it are answered on time.

A milestone is billed when the client accepts the deliverable, and in Mi Retail that acceptance is part of the work, not an email someone forwards later. When the delivery team completes a milestone, the deliverable goes to the client for review as a derived work item. Once the client accepts it, finance receives a billing request with the acceptance, the statement of work reference and any approved change orders attached. Finance issues the invoice in its billing system and closes the work item with the invoice reference as evidence. If acceptance is late, the billing request shows as waiting with its reason, so everyone knows why revenue has not moved.

Partners do not need to follow every request. Operational Portfolio shows how each engagement and practice is doing: open client requests, change orders waiting for a decision, deliverables pending acceptance, staffing requests without an answer and milestones blocked from billing. Executive Operations surfaces only what needs a partner: a change order above the engagement lead’s authority, a client that keeps missing its reviews, an engagement where approved scope and planned staffing no longer match. Each item carries its context and history, so a partner decides from Mi Retail instead of calling a status meeting, and the decision is recorded where the team can act on it.

Every work item keeps who acted, when, under which approval and with which documents. When a client questions an invoice, the firm can show the full chain: the client’s original request, the impact review, the partner’s approval with its reason, the countersigned change order, the delivered work and the client’s acceptance of the milestone. Control & Assurance lets a quality or risk team review those trails without asking consultants to search their inboxes. Because the evidence is captured while the engagement runs, not rebuilt at the end of a dispute, conversations with the client start from facts both sides already saw in their own Mi Retail.

Yes, it is the same product at both ends. In a small agency where the founder sells, approves and delivers, the experience collapses to the essentials: one Today view with client requests, pending approvals and deliverables due this week, without approval chains or teams that do not exist. In a consultancy with several practices and hundreds of consultants, the same work items are distributed across account owners, partners, resourcing, delivery and finance, each with its own surface, and exceptions escalate to the right level. As the firm grows, nothing has to be migrated: responsibilities are split among more people, but the work is represented the same way.

Yes. Law and accounting firms live on requests to and from clients: documents to collect, instructions to confirm, drafts to review, sign-offs before filing and fee approvals when a matter grows. In Mi Retail each of those becomes a work item with an owner and a due date, linked to the matter or engagement it belongs to. A request for documents can be derived to a client who is on Mi Retail and followed until the documents arrive, and a blocked item carries its reason, so the team knows exactly what is missing. Your practice management or accounting software keeps the matter record, time and billing; Mi Retail keeps the people moving around it.

The Professional Services edition of StoneOS brings apps for the domain work of a firm — engagements, statements of work, resource staffing, skills matching, utilization, billable time, retainers, deliverables, milestone billing and engagement profitability — on top of the Business Core apps every team uses: Docs, Drive, Chat, Calendar, People, Notes, Sheets, Slides and To-do. Those apps keep the depth of each domain. Mi Retail is where the work they generate meets the people who must move it: a staffing gap, a retainer running low, a deliverable waiting for client review or a milestone ready to bill lands as a work item in the right person’s queue. If you keep your current PSA, it stays the record.

Start with the flow that costs you the most unbilled hours or follow-up — usually client scope changes, deliverable reviews or staffing requests — instead of modeling the whole firm. Create a workspace for one engagement or practice, invite the account owner, the partner, the delivery lead and finance, and let the next client requests arrive as work items instead of emails. Within a few weeks you will see where changes wait, which approvals are slow and which milestones cannot be billed. Then invite key clients to connect their own organization, bring in more engagements and, when it fits, add the Professional Services edition apps from StoneOS. Mi Retail is free to start.