Larking Gowen is an independent firm of Chartered Accountants and Business Advisors based in East Anglia, with over 400 people and 27 partners across five offices in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. They are also a member of PrimeGlobal, an association of advisory and accounting firms.
The firm has been running Beeye in its audit and assurance practice of around 90 people since early 2025.
The spreadsheet stopped scaling
Before Beeye, audit resourcing ran on an Excel spreadsheet. As the firm grew, finding available, suitable resource meant a lot of scrolling. Double bookings and gaps had to be spotted by eye. The firm has two people looking after the schedules, but if multiple people were updating the sheet, the incidents of version control errors and lost changes increased as the firm hired more staff.
"This meant we were being reactive rather than proactive, dealing with issues as and when they arose." – James Nichols, Partner, Larking Gowen
The challenge was more than technical. Two of the firm's three core values run through this story: a commitment to its people, and enduring client relationships which deliver real value. Neither is easy to act on without seeing how evenly and appropriately work is being allocated.
The four things Larking Gowen needed, and now has
Larking Gowen wanted more than just a tidier schedule. They needed real-time capacity data they could use alongside recovery and utilisation improvement initiatives. Four requirements came out of that when looking for a solution:
A live view of the months ahead
Capacity visibility came first. The firm needed an easy-to-use way to see available, suitable staff, covering not only the here and now but also the future view. Larking Gowen was previously running planning cycles every six months with the aim of planning schedules 12 months in advance. This was time consuming and difficult to maintain on spreadsheets. Using Beeye the process is more straightforward so they can now do it quarterly, making it easier to plan further in advance.
Time and billing data integrated
The firm uses IRIS Practice Engine for timesheets and billing and would not take on a scheduling system that could not talk to it. Pulling billing and time data into Beeye lets the firm compare what it scheduled against what it recorded without double keying or data discrepancies.
Support for custom reporting
Schedule data flows out of Beeye into Power BI, where Larking Gowen has built several capacity dashboards. One report compares this year's team on a job with last year's, so the firm can balance continuity with staff development opportunities.
Alignment and relationship
It was important that the relationship between Larking Gowen and their chosen supplier went beyond the transactional. Beeye being a PrimeGlobal Strategic Partner with other customers in the Association was also a factor.
"What led us to choose Beeye in the end was that it felt like a good cultural fit for us as a firm in terms of the people we were working with and the relationship we could build. It also felt like it would be more of a partnership than with some of the other products we looked at," Nichols said.
Larking Gowen felt the opportunity to shape the product was stronger with Beeye than some other options. The firm has seen several of their ideas taken forward as Beeye has developed the product.
Efficiency as a lever for growth
The ability to plan and manage work is significantly easier and faster than when the audit team relied on spreadsheets. Schedulers and managers spend less time hunting for availability.
"One of our managers could say, I need a qualified audit senior for two weeks in November, and within 30 seconds our schedulers can say, yes, we've got this person available, or they can go, no, actually, we haven't got anybody."
This efficiency supports better planning and utilisation, which translates into growth. James Nichols, Partner at the firm, illustrates this with a recent large fee engagement that needed completing at short notice.
"Pre-Beeye, it would have taken us a few days to work out whether we had the capacity to do this job. We had to move some other things around to make it work, but with the capacity dashboards that we've built in Power BI, and the ability to easily move people in Beeye, within a couple of hours we made a decision on whether we were going to be able to resource this new piece of work, which I'm pleased to say we were successful in winning.”
The capacity was already there. What changed is that the firm could see it quickly and easily adjust plans to make it fit. This wasn’t impossible with spreadsheets, but having Beeye meant they could move forward quickly and with confidence.
This same check happens earlier in the engagement lifecycle as a matter of course. The firm tests resource allocation scenarios during the quoting stage, which makes the schedule an input as to which clients it takes on. It works the other way too: they can see where future capacity is open and proactively seek new work to fill it.
Alongside the efficiency and growth case, the firm has felt three other benefit areas over the past 12-18 months:
- Beeye handles most of the roll-forward that the schedulers once did manually
- Ensuring team continuity on client engagements is easier, which directly supports Larking Gowen’s client relationships value, but also makes the work more productive, "when people work on a job for multiple years, they understand the client better, and actually they're more efficient."
- Development opportunities are spread more fairly and intentionally across trainees
Looking forward: bringing budgets into the picture
Eighteen months in, the scheduling runs well. The next step is comparing budgets against actuals and schedules, which would help the firm flag slippage early enough to correct it.
That gap is common, and it comes down to where the three numbers live. In most firms the budgets, timesheets and schedule sit in three different places. Nobody can easily compare budget against actual without a significant time delay, with this reporting usually done after the job closes. By having these three figures in the same software in almost real-time, managers can see projected profitability, in which phase a budget has blown (or where it’s going to), and react accordingly to tighten margins and recovery.
There is also potential for other service lines to use Beeye in the future. Choosing a solution that could work across the firm was important for future proofing, but for now, the need was most prominent in audit and that is where the focus remains in terms of driving the most value from the investment.
Allocating the work, and knowing it went to the right people
Two values drove the decision for change: looking after the firm's people, and building enduring client relationships that deliver real value. Both come down to who is on which job, and for how long. A spreadsheet could allocate the work. It could not tell Larking Gowen whether it was allocating it well. As Nichols summarises, “planning well contributes to how we grow”.
⁂