Kewbed vs BigTime — Capacity Planning Compared

What this comparison is for

BigTime is a professional services automation (PSA) platform built around time tracking, expense capture, billing rates, invoicing and project accounting. It serves consulting firms, accounting practices, IT services shops, engineering firms and other professional services organizations that bill clients for time. Kewbed is a strategic capacity analytics view for organizations where leadership needs portfolio-level visibility into staffing, demand and bench time across the entire workforce. This comparison is not about choosing one over the other. BigTime and Kewbed solve different problems and most consulting or accounting firms that use BigTime will keep using it. Kewbed sits alongside, not in place of it, and this page is for teams trying to understand where each tool fits.

At a glance

Category-by-category

Scope and audience

BigTime is built for professional services firms that bill clients for time. The platform centers on time and expense capture, billing rates and rate cards, invoicing, project budgeting and project accounting. It serves accounting practices, consulting firms, IT services shops, engineering firms, legal practices and marketing agencies that need a single system to track billable hours and turn them into invoices. The expectation is that staff log their time in BigTime every week.

Kewbed sits one level up from the billing layer. It answers the strategic questions: which trades will be over-allocated next quarter, where demand outpaces available headcount and what bench time looks like across the entire portfolio. Organizations that bring Kewbed in usually already have a billing system in place (often BigTime or something similar) and need a unified executive view of capacity that the billing system was not designed to provide.

What each tool is built to do

BigTime's core is the timesheet. Everything else flows from accurate time capture: billable rates applied to logged hours produce draft invoices, expense entries roll into client billing, project accounting tracks budget against actuals and financial reporting closes the loop. Resource planning exists inside BigTime but it is built to support the billing engine, not to act as an executive capacity view.

Kewbed's core is the capacity matrix. It reads staffing data from the PM tools producers and account leads already use (Excel, Smartsheet, MS Project) and surfaces five analytical views: who is allocated to what, current workforce headcount, available hours per resource, unfilled demand and a forward-looking horizon with allocated, available, needed and gap per trade. There is no timesheet, no invoicing and no project accounting in Kewbed.

Financial layer

BigTime is the financial system of record for billable services. Billing rates can be set per staff member, per role, per client or per project. Time entries hit invoices with markup rules, expense reimbursement flows into client billing, project accounting tracks revenue and cost against budget and integrations with QuickBooks, Sage Intacct and Lacerte close the books. This is where BigTime is strongest and where it is hardest to replace once a firm relies on it.

Kewbed tracks billing rates at the resource level with point-in-time snapshots so capacity decisions are made with rate context. Kewbed does not invoice, does not handle expense reimbursement and does not replace project accounting. The financial data in Kewbed is built around the staffing view: when a senior consultant is being slotted into junior-rate work, that becomes visible. It is rate-aware planning, not billing.

Forecasting and demand

BigTime's resource planning supports allocating named staff to projects and seeing utilization against billable targets. It is allocation-oriented: who is booked on what, with billable utilization tracked against goals. The forecast is largely a function of confirmed projects with confirmed staffing.

Kewbed treats demand as a first-class concept through generic resources: project needs defined before real people are assigned. The Horizon view shows demand against availability per trade across the entire portfolio, including tentative projects not yet confirmed. That distinction matters when hiring decisions need to be made ahead of confirmed work and when demand has to be tracked separately from staffing.

Integration model

BigTime integrates with QuickBooks, Sage Intacct and Lacerte on the accounting side, Salesforce and HubSpot on the CRM side, Slack and Microsoft 365 for collaboration, Jira for engineering workflows and Zapier as the catch-all. The integrations exist to keep BigTime as the operational source of truth for billable time and to push financial data into the accounting books of record.

Kewbed's integration approach is import-based: it reads from the PM tools organizations already use (Excel, Smartsheet, MS Project) and presents that data in a unified executive view. BigTime's CSV exports for projects and resource allocations can feed Kewbed's imports. The two systems answer different questions: BigTime answers "how much should we bill this client?" Kewbed answers "where will we be short on senior consultants in Q3?"

Multi-tenancy and scale

BigTime is single-organization. Each account holds one firm's staff, projects, time, expenses, rates and invoices.

Kewbed supports a two-tier model: a parent organization with multiple tenants underneath. This fits managed service providers, holding companies or any firm that needs to maintain separate capacity views for distinct business units while rolling up to a single executive dashboard.

When to pick BigTime

• The priority is time tracking, expense capture, billing rates, invoicing and project accounting for billable services.
• The firm bills clients by the hour or by the project and needs a single platform that owns the path from timesheet to invoice.
• The accounting stack maps to BigTime's native integrations (QuickBooks, Sage Intacct or Lacerte).
• The firm is single-organization and does not need multi-tenant capacity rollup across separate business units.
• Utilization against billable targets is the central operational metric.

When to pick Kewbed

• Leadership needs a portfolio-level capacity view and the existing billing or PSA tools are not going anywhere.
• Strategic capacity questions (where will we be over-allocated, who is on the bench, what is the forward gap per trade) are not well served by the billing system.
• Generic resource demand needs to be tracked separately from confirmed allocations, including demand from tentative projects not yet confirmed.
• The firm runs multiple business units or client accounts that need separate capacity views with a common executive rollup.
• BigTime stays for billing and Kewbed gets added for capacity reporting on top.

Switching from BigTime to Kewbed

• Coexistence: BigTime for the financial layer, Kewbed for the staffing and capacity layer. This is the normal pattern. Most consulting and accounting firms will keep BigTime and add Kewbed alongside, not migrate off it.
• Export staff, projects and resource allocations from BigTime using its CSV exports. Time-entry data is not what Kewbed needs; project and resource data is.
• Map staff into Kewbed's department and trade hierarchy. Trades are the key organizational unit for capacity reporting in Kewbed.
• Decide on a refresh cadence for the export. BigTime keeps owning the billing source of truth while Kewbed surfaces the executive capacity view.
• Book a demo with the Kewbed team to walk through the import process and confirm the hierarchy mapping before going live.