Use cases / Time & billing
Use case
The work is done. The invoice is three weeks behind it.
Firms that sell time are strangely bad at capturing it. The hours get worked, then reconstructed on Friday from memory and a calendar, then billed whenever month-end comes round — and some of them never get billed at all.
Reconstructed from memory.
It's half four on Friday and someone is staring at their calendar, working out what they did on Tuesday. The timesheet gets filled in from memory, in tidy blocks that never quite match the day. The work-in-progress report is a best guess, so nobody fully trusts it. And between the job being finished and the invoice going out sits a gap of days or weeks — with the odd write-off inside it that nobody ever actually decided to make.
The standing fix is discipline: fill your timesheet in daily, bill on time. But the tools where the work happens — email, calls, documents, the job itself — aren't connected to the thing that records and bills it, and no amount of Friday-afternoon willpower wires them together.
How it actually works.
- Time is captured where the work happens. Tell the system in plain English — "forty minutes on the Hartley accounts" — and it's logged. That's not hypothetical: on the platform we run for a UK firm, staff record time through an AI chatbot, alongside the other places the system picks it up.
- Every entry lands against the right job on its own. Client, matter, rate — matched when the time is logged, not reconstructed at month-end. Work-in-progress stops being a guess and becomes a live number.
- Draft invoices are assembled when your trigger hits. A stage completed, a threshold reached — or month-end, if that's genuinely your rhythm rather than just the only trigger you had. A person approves each one; nothing leaves unseen.
- Once it's sent, the chasing is automatic. Polite reminders that escalate on their own and stop the moment payment lands — invoice chasing, on the same rails.
Where we've done it
Time to invoice, without the ritual.
We've built this. On the platform that runs a UK firm's whole operation, time is tracked as the work happens — including through a chatbot staff simply talk to — and billing runs on the same system that holds the jobs, so the invoice is assembled from what was actually done, not from Friday's memory.
What module one looks like.
We don't rebuild your billing in one go. Module one is usually capture — because everything downstream is only as good as the record of what was done.
Capture that doesn't feel like admin
Plain-English time logging wired to your actual jobs and rates, with a live work-in-progress view — live in about a month. Then invoice assembly on your triggers. Then the chasing.
What the leak costs.
Nobody can hand you a universal figure for this, because the cost is yours: the hours worked but never recorded, the recorded hours never billed, and the weeks a finished job waits before the money moves. Every firm that bills time has a number here — most have never measured it.
Price the Friday timesheet ritual itself →Then look at last quarter's write-offs and ask how many were decisions, and how many were just gaps between systems.
Not sure this is the one to fix first? The 20-question self-audit ranks your processes — free, two minutes, no email →Where this goes next
- Invoice chasing that runs itself → — what happens after the invoice goes out.
- For legal practices → — billing that doesn't wait for month-end.
- For recruitment agencies → — timesheets that become invoices on their own.
Start here
Bring us last month's timesheets.
A free process audit is thirty minutes. Walk us through how time gets from the desk to the invoice — and where it leaks — and you'll leave with a written map of how it could get there without the reconstruction, whether or not we ever work together.
No pitch deck, no obligation. The map is yours either way.