Eleven Systems. Zero Truth.

Eleven Tools. One Unanswerable Question.

The firm had grown by adding software tools one at a time as problems arose. CRM was Salesforce, project management was Asana, timesheets were tracked in Harvest, expenses in Expensify, invoicing in QuickBooks, HR in BambooHR, and the gap between all of them was filled by a rotating cast of spreadsheets maintained by three different administrators. The data lived in fragments. Every meaningful business question required someone to pull data from multiple systems, reconcile the differences, and produce an answer in a spreadsheet that would be out of date before it was read.

The breaking point was a client dispute. A major client questioned the hours billed on a six-month engagement. The firm needed to produce a complete record of all billable time, by consultant, by task, mapped to the project budget, reconciled against what had been invoiced. It took the operations manager and a senior associate four full days to assemble the file — pulling from Harvest, Asana, QuickBooks, and two spreadsheets. The managing partners agreed: they were operating a $9.8M business on infrastructure that couldn't answer a basic billing question without four days of manual work.

1. P&L visible at firm level only — no engagement-level cost, revenue, or margin. Consulting profitability lives at the project level. Without a system that connected time tracking, direct costs, and invoicing to a specific engagement, leadership was managing by portfolio average — hiding which clients and project types were actually driving margin.
2. Harvest timesheets had no automatic connection to QBO invoicing — manual re-entry every billing cycle. Billing coordinator spent 2.5 days per billing cycle manually transcribing approved timesheets from Harvest into QBO invoices. Re-entry errors created billing disputes. Approved hours sometimes missed a cycle and were never invoiced — estimated $120K annually.
3. Salesforce CRM had no connection to project delivery — win rate known, revenue realisation unknown. A project won in Salesforce disappeared from the CRM at contract signature. Delivery, staffing, scope changes, and invoicing happened in entirely separate systems. Leadership had no view of the relationship between pipeline, won work, and cash receipt.
4. Consultant expenses logged in Expensify, approved there, manually re-entered into QBO — average 23-day reimbursement. 23-day average from expense submission to reimbursement was a recurring staff satisfaction complaint. The delay was entirely process-related: Expensify approval took 2 days; QBO re-entry backlog added 21 more.

One Platform. Project, Time, Billing, and Finance — Connected.

OPS implemented Odoo's Project, Timesheets, Invoicing, Expenses, Accounting, CRM, and Employees modules as a unified platform. The implementation was sequenced to deliver the highest-pain fix — timesheet-to-invoice automation — within the first 30 days, with the full platform live at day 75.

1. CRM to Project — Connected Pipeline. Salesforce retired. Odoo CRM implemented with a pipeline stage that creates a project automatically on deal close. Project budget, billing rate structure, and assigned consultants flow from the CRM opportunity. Won revenue becomes a project delivery record on day one — no handoff, no re-entry.
2. Timesheets — Approved & Auto-Billed. Harvest retired. Odoo timesheets deployed with project-level task structure. Approved timesheets flow directly to draft invoices — billing coordinator reviews, adjusts narrative, and sends. Re-entry eliminated. Billing cycle reduced from 2.5 days to 4 hours. Unbilled work audit on migration identified $420K of approved hours that had never been invoiced across the prior 18 months.
3. Project Profitability — Live. Every engagement now has a live P&L: budget vs. actual hours by consultant, direct costs (travel, materials, subcontractors), revenue invoiced vs. earned, and projected final margin. Managing partners can see any project's financial status in under 30 seconds. Engagement profitability report runs automatically at month-end.
4. Expenses — Same-Day Reimbursement. Expensify retired. Odoo Expenses deployed. Consultants submit with receipt photo from mobile. Manager approves in Odoo. Finance posts the reimbursement in the same workflow — no re-entry. Average reimbursement time: 3 business days. The 23-day backlog eliminated on go-live.
5. HR Consolidation. BambooHR retired. Odoo Employees and Leave Management deployed. Employee records, contract terms, leave balances, and timesheet capacity planning unified. 60 employee records migrated. Leave approvals automated — no email chain, no spreadsheet tracking.

One Question. Thirty Seconds to Answer

The first month-end after go-live, the managing partner ran the engagement profitability report himself. It took 28 seconds. Three engagements were below the firm's 22% target margin — all three had been invisible in the prior system. Two were renegotiated; one was declined for renewal. The $420K of unbilled work identified during migration was invoiced in the first billing cycle, representing the single highest-value month of collections in the

They couldn't answer 'are we profitable on this engagement?' That's not a reporting problem — that's a systems architecture problem. When every piece of data lives in a different tool, no one tool can give you the truth. Odoo gave them one place where the whole business lives.OPS Engagement Director · Odoo Professional Services Practice