Billing reconciliation, cut from ~800 hours a month to almost none.
A large London accounting firm was reconciling client billing by hand across separate systems. We built an automation that reads, validates, posts and reconciles each bill, then tracks it through to paid, so the finance team now handles only the exceptions.
Context
The firm handles a high volume of client billing every month. Because the billing platform and the accounting ledger were never connected, staff moved figures between them by hand and checked them line by line before close.
The problem
Reconciliation consumed roughly 800 staff hours a month. The work was slow, easy to get wrong under deadline, and it pulled qualified finance staff away from work that actually needed their judgement.
What we built
We built an automation that reads each incoming bill, extracts the line items, checks them against the source records, and posts the matched entries straight to the ledger. It then reconciles each entry and tracks the bill through to paid. Anything that does not match is sent back for checking or routed to a person with the mismatch already flagged.
- 01Reads and extracts every incoming bill
- 02Validates line items against source records
- 03Posts matched entries to the ledger automatically
- 04Reconciles each entry and tracks it through to paid
- 05Routes only genuine exceptions to a person
The decision that mattered
We chose not to replace either existing system. Rewriting the billing platform or the ledger would have been a far larger, riskier project. Instead we automated the gap between them, which kept the build inside the £1k to £10k range and let the firm keep tools its staff already knew.
staff hours removed every month
per-bill turnaround, from days to minutes
what staff now spend billing time on