The client portal for independent HR and talent consultants.
Move sensitive work without email attachments, get three approvers onto one version, and bill the fractional retainer even during open enrolment.
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Generic client tools don’t know what you actually deliver.
Your work touches things people are careful about
Compensation bands, org design that implies role changes, an investigation, a handbook rewrite that changes what employees are entitled to. This material moves through a business carefully or not at all, and emailing a comp study as an attachment is how it ends up somewhere it should not be.
Sign-off needs three people who are never free at once
The CEO wants it done, the CFO owns the budget line, and whoever handles legal has to look at the language. Getting a policy or a comp structure approved means keeping three busy people aligned on the same version, which turns into a reply-all thread with four attachments named final_v3.
The calendar drives you, not the other way round
Open enrolment, review cycles, year-end comp planning, the compliance date nobody flagged until October. Your engagements cluster into the same weeks every year, and everything else — invoicing especially — gets deferred until the crunch is over.
Fractional HR is a retainer that never bills itself
A standing monthly block for a company without an HR function is the most common independent HR arrangement there is, and it is recurring by definition. It is also the invoice most likely to be sent two weeks late because a client emergency ate the first of the month.
How HR and talent consultants use ConsultBase.
How does an HR consultant use ConsultBase?
You create an engagement per client and give it milestones matching the real programme — current-state review complete, benchmarking delivered, structure drafted, stakeholder review, final approved, rollout support. Deliverables sit under those milestones for the client to formally approve, which creates a dated record of exactly which version was signed off. The client sees it in a portal branded to your practice rather than a folder of attachments.
How does this handle sensitive material like comp studies?
Documents live in the engagement rather than in email, so there is one current version rather than four forwarded copies. Client data is isolated at the database level rather than by application logic, and portal access is passwordless and scoped to that single client. When you need to get a document to someone outside the portal — an external counsel, a board member — you can send an expiring download link rather than an attachment that lives in their inbox permanently.
What happens when three people have to approve the same deliverable?
They all look at the same portal, at the same current version, and the approval is recorded against the deliverable with a date. That replaces the reply-all thread where two people are commenting on a version the third has already superseded. It does not chase them for you — but it removes the ambiguity about what is being approved, which is usually where the delay actually sits.
How do I bill a fractional HR retainer?
Set up a recurring invoice once — amount, frequency, payment terms, your own tax rate — and it generates and sends on schedule with a payment link attached, including during the weeks when open enrolment has taken over your life. You can pause, resume or end the schedule as the arrangement changes. Payments run through your own Stripe account at Stripe’s standard rates.
What about project work alongside the retainer?
Run it as a separate engagement for the same client — a handbook rewrite or a comp study alongside a standing monthly block. You can log time against it and convert those entries into an invoice with line items pre-filled, so project work billed hourly does not have to be reconstructed from memory at month end.
Does it help with proposals and scoping?
Proposals are built in ConsultBase and sent as a link the client signs online; on acceptance the engagement is created automatically with its milestones seeded, and the proposal converts to an invoice in one click. The free SOW, engagement letter and retainer agreement generators produce formatted PDF or Word documents with no account required if you want a starting point for the contracting.
Questions HR and talent consultants ask.
Is this an HRIS, or does it store employee records?
Neither, and that distinction matters. ConsultBase holds your engagement with the client organisation — scope, deliverables, documents, approvals, invoices. It is not an HRIS, has no employee record structure, and is not designed as a system of record for personnel data. Your client’s employee data should stay in their HR system; what lives here is your advisory work product.
Is it appropriate for investigation work?
For the engagement management around it, yes — scoping, invoicing, and the client relationship. For the investigation file itself, think carefully. Investigation records can become discoverable in litigation and often need handling under a specific retention and access policy. ConsultBase gives you database-level client isolation and passwordless scoped access, but it does not offer legal hold, per-document access control, or retention policy enforcement, and you should not assume it as a compliant investigation repository.
Can my client’s legal counsel see a document without portal access?
Yes. Documents can be shared as expiring download links to people outside the portal, which is the usual route for external counsel or a board member who does not need standing access to the engagement.
Can I bring an associate in for a larger project?
Pro includes up to three team members and Firm up to five, with owner, admin and member roles governing who can invite, remove, change branding and manage bookings. It is a workspace-level role system rather than per-engagement access control — an associate can see the workspace, not one client. Worth knowing when the work is sensitive.
What does it cost, and is my client count capped?
Every paid plan includes unlimited clients, so a portfolio of fractional retainers plus project work is not a pricing problem. Plans differ on team size, AI access and white-labelling. Firm removes the “Powered by ConsultBase” mark from every client-facing surface. There is a 14-day free trial and no credit card is required.
Independent HR consultants work on the material a business is most careful about, usually for clients who have no HR function of their own and are therefore relying on you completely. That combination sets a higher bar for how the work is handled than the tooling most solo practitioners have available.
ConsultBase was built for advisory practices specifically — engagements rather than projects, deliverables the client formally approves rather than tasks, retainers rather than subscriptions. For HR work the approval trail earns its keep, because "which version did we sign off, and when" is a question that gets asked months later and usually matters.
It will not be your client’s HRIS and should not try. It handles your side of the relationship, so a one-person practice reads to a nervous first-time client as a firm that has done this before.
Built for the way you work.
Unlimited clients on every plan, a branded portal your clients actually log into, and Ivy — a 50+ tool AI associate that knows your engagements.
Start your 14-day free trialPrefer to try something first? Use our free SOW and contract generators — no account needed.