Sanitized recreation Get Paid Faster
Billing operations
Billing Operations and Revenue Leakage Audit
If a firm bills for time, money slips out quietly: hours that never reach an invoice, an old rate still on file, a retainer overage nobody billed, or the same hours billed twice. This composite case reconciles three things that should agree: recorded time, what got invoiced, and what the engagement terms say. Every gap gets a category and a root cause, and the workflow gets fixed at the source.
Composite case · Marlow Partners (fictional) · Illustrative data. A fictional company and fictional data, built to show the same type of work Kelly has really done.
The scenario
- A professional-services firm billing hourly, on retainer and under caps (composite, illustrative).
- Time is tracked in one system and invoiced from another, with a manual export in between.
- Rates changed, but some client records still carry the old ones.
- Retainer overages are supposed to be billed every quarter. Nobody owns that.
- Some hours sit unapproved for months.
The ask: “Are we billing for the work we do, and only for the work we do?”
The approach
- Reconcile three sources, not two: recorded time, invoices and engagement terms.
- Do not trust the report until it is proven against source data.
- Categorize every exception by cause.
- Treat overbilling as seriously as underbilling.
- Size it honestly and label estimates as estimates.
- Fix it at the source with time-entry standards and a pre-invoice review. Accounting judgments go to the firm’s CPA.
Deliverables
- Client-by-client reconciliation workbook
- Exception register with category, root cause, owner and status
- Leakage summary by category (illustrative shares)
- Engagement terms reference
- Redesigned invoice lifecycle and pre-invoice review checklist
- Monthly reconciliation SOP and client correction templates
What is real here
Kelly has reconciled recorded time against invoices and engagement terms, found exceptions and unbilled work, and fixed the billing workflow with time-entry standards and training. This is a composite case: the firm, clients, volumes and every number are illustrative, and nothing comes from a real client or employer.
Service path: Get Paid Faster
Related: Job costing and profitability
The storyboard
Composite case · Marlow Partners (fictional) · Illustrative data. Images are 16:9 slides from the sample project.
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