The challenge
A global professional services firm — operating across multiple continents, processing over 1,600 invoices every month — had a billing approval process that was quietly consuming significant senior time.
Partners were being pulled into invoice reviews that should have been automated. Operations teams were manually chasing approvals. Project Managers were involved in routing decisions a workflow could handle. And disputes involving credit and debit notes required manual escalation to Commercial Finance every time.
No single step was catastrophic. Together, they added up to a material and measurable drag on capacity — at every level of the organisation.
What we did
We mapped the full billing approval process end to end — every step, every role, fully loaded with real salary costs. We identified three distinct automation opportunities, each with its own return profile.
Structured approval packs generated automatically, eliminating the back-and-forth that was consuming 15 minutes of Partner time per invoice. Auto-chase sequences replacing 18 minutes of manual Ops chasing. Structured routing removing 10 minutes of PM involvement per transaction.
Built on the same workflow patterns as Journey 1 — two additional days of build, reusing the approval infrastructure already in place.
Structured escalation packs to Commercial Finance, eliminating 45 minutes of manual approval time per credit or debit note. 1,500 notes per year in scope.
The numbers
| Annual invoice volume | 19,200 |
| Annual credit/debit notes | 1,500 |
| Saving per invoice (Partner + Ops + PM time) | £52 |
| Saving per credit note | £68 |
| Implementation cost (7 days total) | £10,500 |
| Annual saving at 25% invoice scope | £352,000 |
| Annual saving at 50% invoice scope | £604,000 |
| Break-even point (25% scope) | 11 days |
| Break-even point (50% scope) | 6 days |
| First-year ROI (25% scope) | 32x |
| First-year ROI (50% scope) | 56x |
Volumes confirmed by the organisation's COO. Rate assumptions from our process mapping. Saving scales with approval scope — the sensitivity table presented to the client showed the full range rather than a single headline figure.
The methodology
The key discipline in this analysis wasn't the automation design — it was the honest treatment of uncertainty. The single most important variable was the approval scope: what proportion of the 19,200 annual invoices actually flow through the partner approval chain? Rather than assuming a number that maximised the headline saving, we presented a full sensitivity table and flagged this as the question to validate with Finance before proceeding.
That approach — modelling the range, naming the unknowns, and presenting a defensible case rather than a compelling one — is how we approach every engagement. The numbers should withstand scrutiny. Ours do.
What this demonstrates
This analysis was built for a global organisation. The methodology is identical for a 20-person professional services firm. The volumes are different. The rigour is the same.