Benchmark metrics based on employees; finance total spend as a percentage of revenue

My post of April 9, 2005 discussed IT, HR, and Finance benchmarks as polestars for legal benchmarks. A book I reviewed recently The Professional Services Firm Bible, John Baschab and John Piot, Eds.offered two benchmarks on Finance. With the first, the book showed Finance headcount as a percentage of business unit headcount (it was not clear whether the denominator was only business unit headcount or all headcount). I have not seen data of legal staff as a percentage of all employees.

The same piece stated that “in a mid-size firm, IT costs should range from 1 percent to 3 percent of revenue.” That range is too broad to have much punch, but it corroborates that Finance is likely to be from twice legal to six times legal in expenditure.