The client portal for independent management consultants.
Run phase-gated engagements your sponsor can follow between readouts, keep scope visible without being adversarial about it, and present like the firm you are competing against.
Start your 14-day free trialUnlimited clients on every plan • No credit card required
Generic client tools don’t know what you actually deliver.
You are being compared to a firm with a brand team
When a mid-market executive is choosing between you and a boutique with fifteen people, the work is rarely the deciding factor — the impression of institutional competence is. Sending them to a shared Drive folder is the moment that comparison resolves against you, and it happens before anyone has read your analysis.
The gap between readouts is where confidence leaks
Diagnostic phases are quiet by nature. Three weeks of interviews and data work produce nothing the sponsor can see, and the silence gets filled with their own assumptions. By the time you present, you are recovering ground rather than building on it.
Scope was agreed in a conversation, not a document anyone reopens
Management engagements expand through reasonable-sounding requests — one more workstream, one more stakeholder group, a board version of the deck. Individually each is small. Collectively they are the difference between a profitable engagement and a busy one.
Phase-gated work bills badly through generic invoicing
Diagnostic, design, implementation support — each phase has its own fee and its own trigger. Most invoicing tools treat the engagement as one flat thing, so you either invoice by hand at every gate or bill monthly and lose the connection between the payment and what it bought.
How management consultants use ConsultBase.
How does an independent management consultant use ConsultBase?
You create an engagement per client and give it milestones matching your phases — diagnostic complete, findings presented, recommendations approved, implementation plan delivered, post-implementation review. Deliverables sit under those milestones for the sponsor to review and formally approve. The client sees the whole thing in a portal carrying your firm name, logo and colours, at your own URL.
What does the sponsor see during a quiet diagnostic phase?
Which phase the engagement is in, which milestones are done, what is currently with them, and what you are waiting on from their side. That last item does more work than it sounds — a good share of perceived delay on management engagements is actually a sponsor sitting on an introduction or a data request, and showing it plainly resolves it without you having to raise it as a complaint.
Does this actually help me compete against boutique firms?
It addresses the specific thing you lose on, which is not capability. A branded portal your client logs into, deliverables they formally approve, proposals signed online, and invoices that arrive on schedule are the operational signals a buyer reads as "established practice." On Firm the ConsultBase attribution is removed from every client-facing surface, so nothing on the portal or the emails says anyone else built it.
How do I keep scope visible without being adversarial about it?
The engagement shows exactly which deliverables were agreed, so an addition is visibly an addition rather than an ambiguous extension. When something genuinely new comes up, you send it as a fresh proposal the client signs online — which creates its own engagement and milestones on acceptance. The conversation becomes routine rather than a negotiation about what "was included."
Can I bill by phase rather than one lump sum?
Yes. An accepted proposal converts to an invoice in one click, and you can invoice per milestone as each gate closes. For ongoing advisory — a standing monthly block, fractional executive time — set up a recurring invoice once with your own amount, frequency, terms and tax rate, and it sends on schedule with a payment link. Payments go through your own Stripe account at Stripe’s standard rates.
What if I bring in associates for a larger engagement?
Pro includes up to three team members and Firm up to five, with owner, admin and member roles controlling who can invite people, remove them, change branding and manage bookings. That covers the common shape of an independent practice pulling in two or three trusted associates for delivery — though it is a workspace-level role system, not per-engagement access control.
Questions management consultants ask.
Is this a project management tool for running the engagement internally?
No. There is no Gantt chart, no resource levelling, no workstream dependency modelling. ConsultBase manages the client-facing half — the portal, deliverables and approvals, documents, proposals and billing — while your own analysis and delivery work stays wherever it already lives. Most independent consultants find that separation is what they wanted anyway; the client should not be looking at your working files.
Can I use my own deck and document templates?
Yes — you produce deliverables however you already do and share the finished files through the engagement, where the client reviews and approves them. ConsultBase does not impose a document format on your work. It does include free generators for SOWs, engagement letters and retainer agreements if you want a formatted starting point for the contracting side.
How white-labelled is the client experience really?
Your logo, colours and business name appear on the portal and on transactional emails, and the portal sits at your own slug on the ConsultBase domain. On Starter and Pro a "Powered by ConsultBase" mark remains on client-facing surfaces; Firm removes it entirely. To be precise about a claim that gets overstated in this category: custom domains are not offered, so the portal URL will be myconsultbase.com/yourpractice rather than portal.yourfirm.com.
Do my clients need to create accounts?
No. They receive an email invite and sign in with a link — no password to set, nothing to remember between logins. For a busy executive sponsor, that is the difference between a portal that gets used and one that gets ignored after week two.
What does it cost, and is my client count capped?
Every paid plan includes unlimited clients — plans differ on team size, AI access and white-labelling, not on how many clients you serve. There is a 14-day free trial and no credit card is required to start.
The hardest part of independent management consulting is not the work. It is that a buyer cannot inspect the work before committing, so they read every available proxy instead — how you contract, how you communicate, how you invoice, what happens after they say yes.
Firms win that comparison by default because they have operational machinery behind them. An independent consultant doing the same quality of work is judged by the same signals and usually has none of the apparatus, which is why the gap shows up in perception long before it shows up in outcomes.
ConsultBase is that apparatus, minus the firm. Engagements rather than projects, deliverables the client approves rather than tasks, retainers rather than subscriptions — the vocabulary and the mechanics of an established practice, run by one person.
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.