Cut DSO by 19 days, recovered $3.1M in unbilled WIP.
A 240-person management-consulting firm at $95M revenue
Time entries went in late, invoices went out late, and write-offs piled up at quarter-end. We rebuilt the timekeeper-to-cash pipeline around a continuous-billing agent that nudges, drafts, and flags exceptions in real time.
What was actually broken.
The firm's WIP report at quarter-end consistently held $4-5M in unbilled time that was either entered late, coded to the wrong matter, or sitting waiting for a partner narrative that nobody had written. DSO ran at 74 days against an industry benchmark of 55. The CFO had hired a billing-ops manager in 2023 who lasted nine months because the job was 80% chasing people for their time entries. The partners universally hated the timesheet system, and a 2024 vendor switch had made it worse.
What we did, and what we deliberately did not do.
We did not switch the timesheet vendor. We built a continuous-billing agent on top of it. The agent watched calendar events, email metadata, and Slack/Teams threads (with explicit consent) and drafted timesheet entries for each timekeeper to approve or correct end-of-day. It also drafted the narrative for partner review based on the work product itself. Exceptions — wrong matter code, unusual hours, drafts that did not match the matter scope — were flagged to the billing-ops manager rather than discovered three weeks later at invoice prep. The partners did not love it on day one. They loved it on day forty.
“The partners stopped fighting the billing system because they stopped having to do it. The agent drafts. They approve. The narrative is already there. Our DSO came in line with the industry for the first time in eight years.”
What the numbers did, twelve months in.
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