How a 50-person consulting firm eliminated time leakage and recovered 14% margin.
A strategy consulting firm serving mid-market CPG and financial services clients — losing margin to unlogged hours, overdelivery, and billing delays they couldn’t see.
The Challenge
Partners were flying blind on time. Consultants submitted timesheets once a week — often Friday afternoon, from memory. Roughly 18% of billable hours never made it onto a client invoice. Overdelivery was rampant because no one saw it until a retainer had already burned through two-thirds of its budget. Billing cycles stretched as partners chased consultants for missing hours and finance chased partners for approvals. The firm had grown from 30 to 50 people in 18 months, and the operational duct tape was starting to snap.
The Turning Point
A Q2 partner review where the CFO put a single number on the table: $1.8M of delivered work that never got billed. Every partner recognized their own projects in that number. The head of ops said it clearly: “We cannot scale another headcount if we can’t see where our time goes.”
The Solution
Octayne pulled time data from calendars, Jira, and Slack — proposing daily timesheets consultants confirmed in seconds rather than reconstructed on Fridays. Utilization became a live number partners could see any time. Project health scoring flagged overdelivery while there was still time to act. Invoices drafted themselves from approved time, ready for partner review the day a phase closed. QuickBooks sync closed the loop.
The Results
- Billable capture: 82% → 96% — recovered ~$1.4M/year
- Days-to-invoice: 38 → 11
- Overdelivery on retainer projects: down 64%
- Utilization visibility: real-time vs monthly
- Partner time saved on ops review: ~8 hrs/week per partner
- Margin recovery: +14 percentage points
- Time to value: 60 days to full rollout
The New Normal
Partners now run a 15-minute Monday review against live dashboards instead of a 2-hour Friday reconciliation. Project leads see budget burn-down on day 3, not week 3. The CFO closes the month in 4 days instead of 11. When a client pushes back on an invoice, the team pulls up the time-stamped, contextual log in seconds. The firm is growing again — and operations keep up.
We went from guessing to knowing. Every partner can now see what’s happening across the firm in 30 seconds. That alone is worth the subscription.