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Case study · UK management consultancy
How a UK consultancy cut monthly invoicing from 8 days to 4 hours
One operations platform connecting HubSpot, Xero, Signable and SharePoint, live in 6 weeks.
- Industry
- Management consulting
- Size
- 15–20 staff, 200–300 associates
- Systems
- HubSpot, Xero, Signable, SharePoint
- Delivered in
- 6 weeks
Results
- Monthly invoicing
- 8 days to 4 hrs
- Legacy software replaced
- £18k / yr
- Contract generation, previously hours
- Seconds
- More operational capacity without extra headcount
- No new hires
The short version
The problem
Contracts, approvals, associate records and monthly invoicing for 200–300 associates were run by hand across four systems that didn't talk to each other.
What we built
One operations platform on top of HubSpot, Xero, Signable and SharePoint that generates contracts, routes approvals and signatures, and tracks every associate invoice.
The result
Monthly invoicing fell from 8 days to about 4 hours, contracts take seconds, and £18,000 a year of legacy software was switched off.
Before and after
The same job, drawn to scale.
Before
8 days
- 01Work out which associate invoices are expected
- 02Chase missing invoices by email
- 03Check each one against the contract and SOW
- 04Re-key approved invoices into Xero
- 05Compile the month-end report by hand
After
4 hours
- 01Expected invoices listed automatically from CRM contract data
- 02Missing invoices flagged and follow-ups sent automatically
- 03Received invoices checked for accuracy and completeness
- 04Approved invoices automatically pushed to Xero
- 05Dynamic reports built from live data
The problem
Where the time was going.
The consultancy delivers its work through 200–300 external associates. Every engagement needs contracts, approvals and signatures, and every month each associate's invoice has to be expected, chased, checked and paid.
- Monthly invoicing took around 8 working days, chasing and checking invoices one by one.
- Contracts and statements of work took hours to draft for each engagement.
- Deal data, finance, documents and signatures sat in four separate systems, joined up by spreadsheets, email and re-keying.
- An expensive legacy tool, around £18,000 a year, covered only part of the job.
What we built
The moving parts.
Rather than adding another tool, we mapped the full operational lifecycle, from a deal closing in HubSpot to the associate being paid, and built one operations platform around it.
HubSpot stays the system of record. The platform pulls engagement data from it to generate contracts and statements of work, routes them for approval, sends them to Signable and files the signed copies in SharePoint. Associate details, expected invoices and their statuses live in one place, and approved invoices flow into Xero. Reporting is built from the same connected data.
Systems
HubSpotXeroSignableSharePoint
Contracts and SOWs
Generated from CRM data in seconds, not drafted by hand.
Approvals
Clear internal approval routes with status at every step.
E-signature
Approved documents sent to Signable automatically, signed copies filed in SharePoint.
Associate management
One central record of every associate, their contracts and their activity.
Invoice operations
Expected, received and missing invoices tracked with clear statuses and pushed to Xero.
Reporting
Commercial and management reporting built from live, connected data.
The outcome
What changed.
The monthly invoicing run now takes about 4 hours instead of 8 days. Contracts are generated in seconds. The legacy tool, which cost around £18,000 a year, has been switched off. The operations team can see the status of every contract, associate and invoice in one place, and the firm has more capacity to grow without adding headcount.
Related
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70–90%
Estimated reduction in hands-on research time
Hours of manual research per target, now a ready-to-review brief, and the start of a platform.
Research & outreachLive in 8 weeks
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