Success creates its own kind of friction.
As your firm scales—adding clients, staff, and complexity—you might find you’ve outgrown the systems that once helped you build your business. Maybe running reports gets harder, or it takes longer to match resources to projects. Approvals bottleneck. Your team starts wondering if there are more tasks you can automate.
Because BigTime is specifically built to help professional services firms (especially engineering, consulting, IT services, and accounting companies) scale, we often hear from operational leaders with quickly changing needs. Growing pains are common—and sometimes they’re a sign you need to upgrade your tech stack.
Understanding BigTime’s Tiers
BigTime offers three tiers: Essentials, Advanced, and Premier. Each tier is designed to help teams deliver quality work easily and efficiently, without unnecessary bloat.
BigTime Essentials is our tier for small and nimble teams who need out-of-the-box solutions that they can adopt quickly. Built with accessibility in mind, Essentials provides powerful tools to help you track and manage time, expenses, billing, and portfolios, without getting bogged down.
BigTime Advanced, made for mid-sized businesses beginning to scale, includes all the functionality of Essentials, plus more dynamic reporting and tools to support more intricate deals. Advanced gives leaders deeper control, insights, and automations, so they can stay focused while business grows.
BigTime Premier serves scaling firms managing highly complex project loads. Growth-focused and completely configurable, Premier gives firms the flexibility to take on projects with unique demands, without running into limitations.
Whatever your BigTime tier, we want to help make sure you’re getting the best results. That could mean accessing additional training, revisiting your project plans, or moving to a new tier.
Curious about getting more from BigTime? Here are eight common signs that upgrading could help your team succeed.
The Most Common Sign It’s Time to Upgrade, No Matter Your Tier
1. You’re No Longer Focusing on the Work That Matters to You
This might be the single most important sign that something needs to change.
BigTime’s purpose is to give you the time and resources to focus on your most meaningful work. But the solutions that took you from zero to ten might not be the same solutions that take you from ten to one hundred. If you’re sinking time into administrative tasks that hurt your output (or morale), it might just mean you’ve reached the next stage of maturity.
At BigTime, we’re dedicated to giving you your time back, no matter your firm size, project complexity, or most pressing challenge. Contact your Customer Success Manager at any time to get tailored guidance on succeeding in the next step of your BigTime journey.
Signs It’s Time to Move From Essentials to Advanced
2. You Have Questions Your Reports Aren’t Answering
BigTime Essentials comes equipped with standard reports that provide real-time insight into your projects and performance. But as you grow, you manage more projects, more data, and more questions from clients, leaders, and finance teams. These more complex needs might be better met with advanced analytic capabilities.
With BigTime Advanced, you get dynamic reports that you can filter by specific portfolios and staffers. Instead of accessing a library of reports, you set up reports to your own specifications. During this process, you can configure up to 10 custom fields such as invoice date, number, and task, displaying them however you prefer.
3. You’re Exporting Files to Make Small Edits
BigTime Essentials offers templates for your most common documents, including invoices, SOWs, and project reports. If you find yourself exporting these documents just so you can adjust field names or branding elements, you may have outgrown the Essentials functionality.
BigTime can save your team valuable time and money by removing unnecessary manual tasks—like building and editing individual documents. The Advanced tier delivers custom templates for all of your important file types, so you can stop reworking SOWs and invoices every month.
4. You Often Use Multiple Billing Types on a Single Project
For most BigTime Essentials users, each project only needs one billing type, whether that’s time and expense, milestone-based, or fixed fee. If you do need to shift to a different billing type, however, you can manage this in Essentials by setting up a new project for the remaining work.
That’s often enough to keep your projects running smoothly. But if your firm routinely uses multiple billing types on a single project, it’s worth considering an upgrade.
BigTime Advanced supports multiple billing types on each project. Instead of starting a new project for each new rate, you can manage the whole process in a single workflow—so switching to a fixed fee model when you have a new deliverable isn’t a problem.
Signs It’s Time to Move From Advanced to Premier
5. More Team Members Are Getting Involved With Approvals
One common side effect of operational growth—more cooks in the kitchen.
As deals become larger and more complex, it’s normal for more team members to require sign-off before delivering a quote or a finished project. We often see BigTime customers adding more approval steps as they scale. This is where BigTime Premier can help.
BigTime Premier makes it possible to coordinate multi-layer approvals, so everyone who needs oversight gets it. With Premier, you can send approvals all the way from Project Manager to Finance to Exec, without slowing down.
6. You’re Struggling to Pay Vendors at Variable Rates
Paying vendors is easy when they charge a single rate across an entire project. But when rates change based on factors like complexity or demand, tracking payments can get messy fast.
BigTime Premier helps firms accommodate highly nuanced deals by supporting custom expense rates. By storing variable rate information in the platform, you can get payments out the door quickly, and ensure work continues without interruptions. For firms that work with vendors routinely, an upgrade to Premier might be the next step to consistent, timely delivery.
7. You’re Expensing in Multiple Currencies
BigTime Essentials is configured to help firms easily manage expenses in a single currency. As your scope expands, however, you may work with global teams—and global currencies.
Advanced and Premier tiers both support multi-currency expenses for certain contexts. We work individually with firm leaders to find the best solution for your transactions, depending on your specific needs. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information about which BigTime tiers and products are right for your team.
8. You’re Taking on More, and Every Project Looks Different
Being in high-growth mode is exciting—often, it’s the first time leaders really see what’s possible for the future of their firm. But growth rarely just means more of the same. It can also mean more kinds of work, new API needs, unusual billing rates, and client requests you’ve never encountered before.
BigTime Premier is built to help firms navigate diverse (and sometimes unpredictable) project needs. With additional APIs, utilization management, and extended support hours, Premier guarantees your bases are covered when projects go in unexpected directions. For many BigTime users, Premier offers the assurance that they can keep growing, including in entirely new markets.
What to Do If You’re Seeing These Signs
As a tiered and modular solution, BigTime is able to grow right alongside your firm. We’re proud to offer supported transitions so you can upgrade your software without pausing your ongoing operations.
If you’re ready to unlock more power from the BigTime platform, book a quick evaluation from our experts or reach out for a free demo of the next tier. We’re here to help you succeed at every stage in your firm’s growth.
