Context
Billing and revenue processes across the network's offices were largely manual: invoices assembled from spreadsheets, approvals routed by email, and revenue figures reconciled by hand at period close. The processes worked, but only through effort that grew linearly with business volume, and every manual step was a chance for errors that surfaced weeks later in reporting.
The challenge
- Automate billing generation and approval routing across offices with different local requirements.
- Make revenue figures reliable at any point in the month, not only after a painful close.
- Preserve full auditability: finance leadership needed to trace every number back to its source.
My role
I owned the requirements and delivery of the automation program: interviewing finance users to capture the real billing rules (including the exceptions nobody had written down), specifying the automated workflows in detailed FSDs, defining acceptance criteria for calculation accuracy, and managing the sprint-by-sprint rollout with the development team. I also handled invoice reconciliation analysis against time-tracking data to validate that automated outputs matched contractual reality.
Automating the standard case is easy. The value came from systematically capturing the exceptions: special billing arrangements, cross-office allocations, credit notes, and adjustments, and giving each an explicit workflow instead of a workaround. A process is only automated when its exceptions are too.
Approach
- Rule capture before automation. Documented billing rules per office and per client type, validated them with finance leads, and turned them into testable specifications.
- Approval workflows. Replaced email approvals with in-system routing, thresholds, and escalation paths, with every decision logged.
- Reconciliation checks. Built verification steps comparing generated invoices against source data, catching discrepancies before they reached clients.
- Phased rollout. Rolled out office by office, using each phase's lessons to refine the next, keeping business continuity intact throughout.