Status without asking.
The dashboard reads the chain. “Five items are authorized but not invoiced” replaces a message asking who knows.
Case study
Five spreadsheets.
One system of record.
An AI-native back office that carries the overhead, so a firm’s experts spend their day on the work only they can do.
The client and their industry are confidential. What we can show is the method: how we read the way a firm actually works, and designed a system that gives its experts their time back.
The situation
The work was done.
The money was stuck.
The firm ran on five interlocking spreadsheets. The same item was retyped in several of them, and the copies drifted apart. Status lived in free-text remarks addressed to people, and color codes carried meaning that no filter or reminder could read.
So authorized work sat unbilled because nobody saw the authorization arrive. Invoices aged without anyone noticing. Partner costs could pass the authorized fee before anyone looked.
And the firm’s experts were pulled into all of it: answering status questions, rereading sheets, and chasing paperwork instead of doing the work clients pay them for.
AI-native by design
The AI carries the overhead.
Your experts keep the judgment.
Most firms add software to the work. We designed the work around what AI can now take on, and drew a clear line between the two.
The AI handles
- Reading incoming documents and exports
- Matching and filing every item to its place
- Drafting invoices, proposals, and follow-ups
- Tracking status, deadlines, and aging
- Flagging cost risk before it becomes a loss
Your experts own
- The work clients hire the firm for
- Judgment on scope, price, and risk
- Client relationships
- Approving everything that goes out
The value is not the software. It is what your experts do with the hours it returns.
The insight
Every dollar moves
along one chain.
We modeled each piece of work as a chain of six steps. Once the chain is explicit, status, follow-ups, billing, and aging stop being questions and become facts the system can read.
- 01Request
- 02Proposal
- 03Review
- 04Authorization
- 05Invoice
- 06Payment
What we designed.
One fact.
One home.
Billing that starts itself.
When an authorization arrives, a draft invoice appears with the reference already cited. A person reviews it and sends it.
Alarms with an owner.
Anything that sits too long in one step raises its own flag, with a named owner and a suggested next move.
Cost guardrails.
Partner commitments are tracked against the authorized fee. A warning at 85%, and nothing new past 100% without a principal’s sign-off.
How the AI works.
Overhead, handled.
Approval, kept.
Designed so a two-person back office spends under 30 minutes a week on upkeep, and the experts spend none. The system proposes; a person approves.
It reads what arrives.
Authorizations forwarded by email and weekly exports from client systems are read, matched to the right item, and filed. Nobody retypes them.
It drafts the next step.
Invoices, proposals, and follow-up letters are drafted from live data at each client’s own cadence. Nothing is sent until a person approves it.
It turns remarks into work.
A note like “to follow up” becomes a task with an owner and a due date that reminds them, instead of a cell waiting to be reread.
Nothing is trapped: every view exports to a spreadsheet, and clients get a status link that answers “where is my payment?” before it is asked.
The rollout.
Value in weeks.
Trust before cutover.
The new system runs alongside the spreadsheets until the numbers match. The import reads the workbooks as they are, merged rows and all, and a person signs off the reconciliation.
- Weeks 1–3
Foundation
Import the five workbooks as they are, remove duplicates, and reconcile every status. The ledger and dashboard go live.
- Weeks 4–6
Money in
Invoice register, aging, payment matching, and follow-up cadence. First real invoices from authorizations already in hand.
- Weeks 7–9
Generation
Pricing rules from the contract, document drafting, and automatic matching of client exports.
- Weeks 10–12
Control
Partner commitments, cost guardrails, pay-when-paid, accounting sync. The spreadsheets retire.
Your business.
Where do your
experts’ hours go?
If the people you hired for their expertise spend part of every week on overhead, that time can come back to the work. We can help you find it.
Start a conversation Read the Redline case study