The situation
A 15-person professional services firm had a Friday afternoon ritual nobody liked: the team lead would spend three hours pulling data from four different places — their project system, their billing tool, their time tracking software, and a spreadsheet that didn't connect to anything — to produce a weekly status report. Management had no mid-week visibility into project health, utilisation, or billing status. Decisions that needed current data had to wait until Friday. Decisions that couldn't wait were made on stale numbers.
What we built
We built an automated reporting pipeline that pulls from all four data sources every hour and normalises the data into a single view. A live dashboard gives management real-time access to project status, utilisation rates, billing pipeline, and any jobs that are running over time or budget. A weekly digest — formatted, summarised, and ready to read — is generated automatically and delivered to leadership every Monday morning before anyone arrives at the office.
Results
- Friday report process eliminated — team lead recovered 3 hours per week
- Management has live visibility 24/7, not a Friday afternoon snapshot
- Weekly report meeting reduced from 90 minutes to 20 minutes because everyone arrives with context
- Two billing oversights caught in the first month that would have gone unnoticed until end-of-quarter