Professional Services Year-End Checklist: 12 Must-Do Items Before You Close the Books (2025 → 2026)
It’s 2026, which means it’s time to close out 2025.
If you’re in Professional Services, Managed Services (MSP), or Consulting, year-end is when small process gaps turn into big headaches: missed billing, inaccurate revenue recognition, broken forecasts, and margin surprises.
To make year-end (and Q1 planning) smoother, here are 12 practical checklist reminders for services leaders, operations, finance, and project delivery teams.
Who this checklist is for
This checklist is most useful if you’re responsible for:
- Services delivery operations (PSO / PMO / ops leaders)
- Project managers and delivery managers
- Services finance / revenue recognition (Rev Rec)
- Resource management & utilization reporting
- Quote-to-cash ownership (Sales → Delivery handoff)
12 Year-End Checklist Reminders for Professional Services / MSP / Consulting
1) Submit & approve timecards through year-end
Nobody loves time entry – but timecards feed everything:
- Revenue recognition
- Billing accuracy
- Utilization reporting
- Project costing and margin
Year-end action: Set a hard cutoff date and run a report for missing or unapproved timecards.
2) Submit & approve expenses through year-end
Expenses are often even more delayed than timecards, but they still impact:
- Customer billing & employee reimbursement
- Project profitability
- Budget accuracy
Year-end action: Identify stale expense reports and clear them before closing the period.
3) Update expense rates & limits in your PSA / expense tool
Every year comes with policy changes and rate updates.
For example: the IRS business standard mileage rate is $0.725 per mile in 2026 (up from $0.70).
Year-end action: Confirm mileage, per diem, and travel reimbursement rules are updated across systems.
4) Add or update rate cards and offering pricing for 2026
Most services organizations adjust rates or packaging annually (or they should).
Year-end action:
- Update rate cards (standard vs premium resources)
- Update packaged offerings pricing
- Confirm discount policies
If rate cards aren’t updated, you’ll start the year quoting incorrectly & undercut margin before Q1 even begins.
5) Re-price any open opportunities, quotes, and draft SOWs using last year’s rates
This one hits every year.
If you have open:
- Services opportunities
- Draft SOWs
- Unsent quotes
- “Waiting on estimate” pipeline deals
…they’re probably priced with 2025 assumptions.
Year-end action: Pull the list, identify pricing exposure, and re-quote where needed.
If your team is still tracking estimates and SOW drafts in spreadsheets (and chasing people for input), that’s usually a sign you’ve outgrown manual quoting & spreadsheets.
PSQuote helps services teams standardize estimates, shorten quote cycles, and protect margin.
6) Run utilization calculations through year-end
Utilization is one of the most important professional services metrics because it influences:
- Profitability
- Staffing decisions
- Bonus/comp calculations based on utilization targets
- Burnout risk
Year-end action: Lock the utilization calculation rules and run final reporting by team, role, and region.
If you need a refresher on utilization, here’s a helpful resource
7) Run revenue & billing forecasts for Q1–Q2 2026
If your forecasts are built in spreadsheets, you’ve probably seen:
- version control issues
- manual updates
- mismatched assumptions across teams
- leadership asking “why?” and not getting a clear answer
Year-end action: Run a clean forecast for revenue and billing through Q1 and Q2, based on real pipeline plus scheduled delivery.
If you want forecasting you can actually explain and trust, PSForecast helps services teams move beyond spreadsheets to consistent, auditable forecasting.
8) Run revenue recognition through year-end
Revenue recognition is where operational mess turns into financial risk.
Year-end action: Ensure time, costs, milestones, and approvals are captured before running final Rev Rec. If you use fixed fee + percent complete, validate completion logic and supporting documentation.
9) Identify lingering fixed-fee billing milestones from December
Year-end is the best time to capture “low-hanging fruit” billing.
Examples:
- Project kickoff milestone
- Phase completion
- Recurring services milestones
Year-end action: Run a report for unbilled milestones and invoice what’s ready.
10) Approve pending billing events / pro forma invoices
Some services orgs lose thousands at year-end simply because billing approvals are sitting in someone’s queue.
Year-end action: Ask PMs and billing owners to clear approvals & make it a 15-minute year-end ritual.
11) Update project schedules and resourcing plans
Resource schedules affect everything:
- staffing availability
- delivery risk
- revenue & billing forecasts
- hiring decisions
Year-end action: Ensure project schedules reflect reality through at least the first 60–90 days of 2026.
12) Load 2026 holidays into your PSA (Professional Services Automation) System
This is small, but it matters – especially for utilization, capacity planning, and forecasting.
Year-end action: Confirm holidays are entered for each region/team.
Bonus: 3 extra checks (high value, low effort)
A) Review margin by offering / service line
Look for price leakage, overruns, and delivery inefficiencies.
B) Audit pipeline-to-delivery handoffs
Where do assumptions get lost between sales, solutions, and delivery?
C) Confirm 2026 targets and assumptions
Utilization targets, billing assumptions, and planned headcount should align before Q1 begins.
Final thought
Year-end close doesn’t have to be painful, but it does require consistency.
If this checklist revealed recurring gaps (quotes stuck in spreadsheets, forecasts you don’t trust, margin surprises), it might be time to modernize the systems behind your services business.
PSQuote helps teams quote and scope faster with better margin control.
PSForecast helps teams forecast revenue and billing with confidence.
John is the Head of Product at PSQuote. He loves a good meme, churros and spending time with his family & not necessarily in that order!