Most practice owners could not tell you, with any confidence, what every person in the firm is working on right now. Not because they do not care, but because the information has never been in one place. Time gets logged after the fact, if at all. Capacity is a feeling rather than a figure. And when a job runs over, it is usually finished before anyone asks why.
Active Data changes what you can see. It turns the work already happening inside Active into a live picture of your firm: who is working on which clients, where jobs are slowing down, and what your own numbers are telling you. This is the first step in a shift most firms are only starting to make, from managing on instinct to managing on data.
What is Active Data?
Active Data is a set of reporting tools inside Active that show how work is really moving through your firm. It is built from the activity already taking place in the software, so there is nothing extra to log.
It currently has three parts: an Activity Map, a Friction Map, and a Data Lake, each answering a different question about how your practice runs.
The value is not the dashboards on their own. It is that decisions about capacity, pricing, training and profitability can finally be made from what is actually happening, rather than from a best guess at the end of the month.
What is the Activity Map?
The Activity Map is a real-time view of where time is being spent across the firm, drawn from actual work in the software rather than manual timesheets. It has two ways in: a client view and a staff view, so you can look at the same activity from either direction.
The client view shows who has been working on each client, what they were doing, and for how long. That makes work in progress visible while it is still in progress, and gives you an honest read on which clients are absorbing the most time, which matters directly for profitability. The staff view shows what your people have been working on today, this week and this month, and how many hours are going into productive work. The same view holds across the firm, so you can compare office to office and team to team on a like-for-like basis, instead of comparing notes.
What is the Friction Map?
The Friction Map is the newest of the three and still developing, so it is best thought of as an early version rather than the finished article. The idea behind it is simple. It shows where work slows down, at staff, team and office level. Where the Activity Map tells you that two people each spent twenty five hours in Active this week, the Friction Map is being built to show what they were doing in those hours, and how long each stage took.
This is where standardisation pays off. When everyone works to the same set of accounts and work papers, the outliers stand out. If one person takes twice as long as another to reconcile payroll, you can start to ask the useful question: is that a training gap, or are their jobs simply more complex, in which case twice as long might be exactly right? Without the data you would never know to ask. The point is not to police people. It is to find the places where a bit of support, or a change to the process, saves everyone time. This is an area we are actively developing, so expect it to grow richer over time.
What is the Data Lake?
The Data Lake is for firms that want to work with their own data directly, rather than only through the dashboards in the app. The activity behind the Activity Map and the Friction Map feeds into it, and you can connect it to your own BI and reporting tools to build the views you actually want, rather than the ones someone else decided you needed. As an optional add on, firms can also query that data through the AI tools they already use, so a straightforward question can be answered in plain language without building a report first.
The Data Lake will also take in financial figures from your clients. That opens up benchmarking across your client base and a clearer view of where there is room to offer further support or advisory services, turning information you already hold into a reason to have a better conversation with a client.
Why this matters for your firm
Compliance work is steadily being commoditised, and the firms that compete well are the ones that understand their own capacity, costs and bottlenecks. Active Data is a practical way into that. It does not ask you to change how your team works or to adopt anything new to get value. The work is already happening in Active. This simply lets you see it, and make better calls on the back of it.
See it with your own firm’s data
The quickest way to understand Active Data is to see it running on your own practice. Sign up and try it with your own client data.