Forecasting in Ajera: How Principals Use Backlog, Fee Burn, and Staffing to Prevent Surprise Losses

Most firms can tell you how a project went after it’s finished. The firms that stay profitable can tell you how it’s going to go while there’s still time to change the outcome. That difference is forecasting, and it’s the discipline that separates principals who are surprised by losses from those who see them coming.

September is when this matters most. Fall is when firms make their most consequential staffing and pipeline decisions, deciding whether to hire, which projects to pursue, and how to allocate the team across the work ahead. Those decisions are only as good as the forward-looking information behind them.

Ajera holds the data to support that forecasting. The challenge is using it deliberately. Working with an Ajera consultant for project accounting optimization often comes down to turning the system’s raw data into the three forward-looking views principals actually need: backlog, fee burn, and staffing.

Why backward-looking reporting isn’t enough

Financial statements and completed-project reports tell you what already happened. They’re essential, but they’re a rear-view mirror. By the time a loss appears in last month’s numbers, the decisions that caused it were made weeks or months earlier.

Forecasting flips the orientation. Instead of asking how the firm performed, it asks how the firm is going to perform if nothing changes, and where intervention now would change the result. For a project-based firm, this forward view is the only way to manage profitability while there’s still leverage to affect it.

The three pillars of that forward view are backlog, fee burn, and staffing.

Backlog: how much profitable work is actually ahead

Backlog is the work you’ve won but not yet completed. On the surface it’s a comfort, evidence that the pipeline is healthy. But backlog viewed carelessly can be dangerously reassuring.

What matters is not the size of the backlog but its quality and timing:

• Profitability. Is the work in your backlog priced to make money, or have you filled the pipeline with projects that will strain margins?
• Timing. Does the backlog arrive evenly, or does it cluster in a way that will overwhelm the team in some months and starve it in others?
• Certainty. How much of the backlog is contracted versus likely versus hopeful?

Used well, backlog data in Ajera tells a principal whether the firm has enough of the right work at the right time, which is the foundation of every staffing decision that follows.

Fee burn: are projects consuming budget faster than they should

Fee burn is the rate at which a project consumes its fee relative to the work completed. It is the single most important early-warning signal in project accounting, because it reveals margin erosion while the project is still active.

A project that has burned 70 percent of its fee at the halfway mark is sending a clear signal. If you see it in real time, you can intervene: adjust staffing, address scope, or have a change-order conversation while it still matters. If you see it only at project close, the loss is already locked in.

This is where Ajera’s ability to compare budget against actuals by phase becomes decisive. Principals who monitor fee burn across active projects catch the troubled ones early, while those who wait for final numbers are perpetually reacting to losses they could have prevented.

Staffing: matching the team to the work ahead

Staffing is where backlog and fee burn translate into a decision. The forecast question is straightforward to ask and hard to answer without good data: does the team you have match the work that’s coming?

Both directions of mismatch are expensive. Too little capacity for the backlog means overworked staff, slipped deadlines, and the write-offs that come from rushed work. Too much capacity for the work ahead means utilization falls and the firm carries cost it can’t bill.

Forecasting staffing against backlog lets a principal see these mismatches before they happen, and make hiring or pipeline decisions deliberately rather than reactively. In the fall, when these decisions carry into the next year, getting this right is especially valuable.

Bringing the three views together

The real power of forecasting comes from reading backlog, fee burn, and staffing together rather than in isolation.

Backlog tells you what’s coming. Fee burn tells you whether current work is healthy. Staffing tells you whether you’re equipped to deliver the backlog profitably. Read as a set, they answer the question every principal needs to answer continuously: are we heading toward a strong year, or toward a surprise?

When these three views are current and trustworthy, the surprises largely disappear. Not because problems stop occurring, but because you see them far enough ahead to act.

Why forecasting breaks down, and how to fix it

When firms can’t forecast reliably in Ajera, the cause is almost always the same: the underlying data isn’t current or consistent enough to trust. Forecasting is built on timesheets, coding, and reconciliations. If those are loose, the forecast is fiction.

Fixing it is less about the forecasting reports themselves and more about the discipline beneath them, consistent time entry, clean project coding, and a reliable close. This is frequently where an Ajera consultant for project accounting optimization adds the most value: not by building fancier reports, but by making the data trustworthy enough that the reports mean something.

Making forecasting a habit, not an event

Forecasting only prevents losses if it happens continuously. A forecast reviewed once a quarter is a snapshot; a forecast reviewed every month is a steering mechanism.

At Summit Business Advisors, we help A/E firms turn Ajera’s data into the forward-looking views principals need to make confident staffing and pipeline decisions. If you want to work with an Ajera consultant for project accounting optimization, or you need a certified Deltek Ajera consultant for project profitability to make your Deltek Ajera project accounting genuinely predictive, we can help you build forecasting into how you run the firm.