Use case · Professional Services
Automation for consulting firms, agencies, and PS teams.
Your billable hour is your product. Every hour your team spends in spreadsheets instead of with clients is margin lost. We automate the operational layer — quote-to-cash, project kickoff, milestone invoicing, utilization reporting — so your team gets back to billable work.
Tell-tale signs
If two or more of these sound familiar, automation is overdue.
We talk to a lot of consulting + agency operators. The patterns are remarkably consistent across firm sizes:
Finance retypes every deal that closes
Sales updates Salesforce. Finance opens Excel, then Stripe, then the GL. The same data lives in 4 places and disagrees in 2.
Project kickoffs take a week of admin
New engagement → 6 Slack DMs, 2 stakeholder calls, a Jira project, a Drive folder, and a kickoff email — all done by hand by your PM lead.
Utilization reporting lags by 2 weeks
You only know who's overbooked or under-utilized after the damage is done. Quarter-end is a fire drill of reconstructing what people actually worked on.
Invoicing is a monthly multi-day project
Time entries pulled from Harvest. Cross-referenced with Salesforce. Categorized by client. Manually entered into QuickBooks or Stripe. Three FTEs lose two days every month.
Highest-ROI automations
What we ship most often for PS firms.
Drawn from our automation catalogue. Each one has shipped for at least one consulting firm — they consistently land in the top quartile of payback periods.
Quote-to-cash orchestration
Closed-Won deal triggers Stripe invoice, Jira project skeleton, Drive folder with naming convention, and a structured Slack handoff to the delivery lead. Replaces 4 manual handoffs with 1 webhook.
See related automationsMilestone-based invoicing
Project milestone marked complete in Jira/Asana → invoice auto-generated in Stripe → client portal updated → AR aging report refreshed. The single biggest cash-flow lever for PS firms.
See related automationsUtilization dashboard automation
Time entries pulled nightly from your time-tracking tool, joined with project budgets and rate cards, surfaced in a live dashboard partners actually look at. No more month-end reconstruction.
See related automationsClient onboarding orchestration
Engagement signed → welcome email + portal credentials + kickoff calendar holds + project board + Slack channel + first-week status template. From a 2-hour PM task to a 30-second trigger.
See related automationsContract redline routing
Contract uploaded to the DMS triggers redline tracking, routes to legal review with SLAs, and notifies sales of approval status — with full audit log for compliance.
See related automationsResource forecasting alerts
Slack alerts when team utilization crosses thresholds (>85% = pipeline alarm, <60% = bench risk). Lets partners course-correct in real time instead of in QBRs.
See related automationsTypical stack
The tools we usually see in this industry.
We integrate around what you run today — no platform swaps required. Don't see your tool? Ask.
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Stripe
- QuickBooks
- Jira
- Asana
- Monday.com
- Harvest
- Toggl
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Workspace
- Notion
- DocuSign
Real engagement
60-person consulting firm — quote-to-cash from 11 days to 38 hours.
The setup
Mid-market professional services firm. Sales in Salesforce, projects in Jira, billing in Stripe + QuickBooks, comms in Slack. Three FTEs spent ~30% of their week reconciling the four systems. Finance team was 8 days behind on invoicing at any given time.
What we did
- 1Mapped quote-to-cash from Salesforce Opp Closed-Won through revenue recognition
- 2Built an n8n orchestration that wires Salesforce → Stripe → Jira → Drive → Slack
- 3Added milestone-based invoice triggers from Jira to Stripe (auto-generates and sends)
- 4Built a utilization dashboard with nightly Harvest sync joined to Salesforce data
- 5Deployed a Slack alerting layer for AR aging, deal-stuck-in-stage, and util thresholds
Outcome
- Time-to-invoice
- 11 days → 38 hrs
- Manual entry eliminated
- 82%
- Annual hours recovered
- 1,250+
- Annual cost saved
- $187k
Pricing snapshot
$10,000 – $40,000
Payback: 60–120 days typical
Most PS firms start with quote-to-cash + milestone invoicing as a single fixed-fee project ($15k–$25k). Adds-on like utilization dashboards and resource alerts are usually $3k–$8k each.
- Free 30-min scoping call
- Industry-specific scope
- Source code + workflows you own
- 30 days post-launch tuning
- Compliance-aware where relevant
Questions
Common questions for professional services.
- We're a 12-person agency. Are we too small?
- No. We've built automations for firms as small as 6 people. The math works out fast when one founder is spending 5+ hours/week on ops. The deciding factor isn't headcount — it's how much time your most expensive people spend in spreadsheets.
- Our PSA tool (Kantata / Mavenlink / FinancialForce) does some of this.
- Yes, and we love working with PSA tools. They handle 60–70% of what's needed and leave gaps everywhere they integrate (which is usually where the pain lives). We extend your PSA with custom workflows instead of replacing it.
- Does this work for retainer-based or fixed-fee work, or only T&M?
- Both. Fixed-fee work has different cash-flow mechanics (deposit + milestone billing) and we model those separately. Retainer-based firms benefit most from utilization automation and ARR-style billing — different builds, same payback math.
- Can you migrate from QuickBooks to NetSuite (or vice versa) as part of this?
- Yes — we handle the migration + ongoing sync. Most PS firms outgrow QuickBooks around 30 FTEs; NetSuite migrations land $20k–$40k as a separate engagement.
Other industries we serve
Different industry? Same patterns.
Ready to scope a build for professional services?
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We'll talk through your stack, your goals, and walk away with a written plan and a quote.