Case study

25-30 hours a week getting orders out and invoices paid, now less than eight

Most owners think a slow back office costs them wages. It costs them the order that missed the midday cut-off, the invoice nobody sent, and the customer who has not paid in ninety days because nobody had time to ring them. This client had all three.

ClientA pharmaceutical company making and distributing its own product

SizeOne part-time bookkeeper carrying close to a full-time workload

EngagementA MYOB to Xero migration years earlier, then the sales order and accounts receivable function outsourced in full

The practice describes this client by its work and never names it. No product, supplier, customer or dollar figure from the engagement appears here.

The situation

Where they started

We first worked with this company several years earlier, on a different problem. They were on MYOB, they wanted to be on Xero, and we handled the migration and built the system around them. Then the project finished and they went back to running their business, as clients do.

A couple of years later they came back. Nothing had broken. The business had simply grown into a problem they could not staff their way out of.

This is a manufacturing and distribution business, which means the finance function does not sit alongside the operation. It sits inside it. Stock moves, and every movement has an accounting consequence that has to be recorded the same day or reconstructed later from memory.

Raw materials arrive from overseas, and the freight and customs charges land separately, weeks apart. Production turns them into finished product through assemblies, each carrying its own batch numbers, expiry dates and wastage. Packaging and shipper boxes are consumed run by run and adjusted out of stock by hand. None of that is unusual for the industry. All of it has to be right before a single invoice goes out.

One part-time person was holding all of it, across two systems, with no written process for any of it. That is close to a full-time workload in a part-time role, which is why things were slipping. It was never carelessness. And when that person took leave, the knowledge went with them.

The challenges

What we found when we opened the file

01 A hard deadline every single day Sales orders had to be processed before midday to reach the distribution centre that day. Miss it and the customer waits another day, for a reason they will never find acceptable.

02 Invoices sitting unsent The order processed, the goods shipped, and the invoice still not issued. Revenue earned and not yet asked for.

03 Debtors nobody was chasing Overdue accounts with no one who had the time, or the appetite, to pick up the phone about them.

04 The process lived in one person's head Nothing written down, so nothing could be checked, handed over or covered. The risk was never the hours. It was the week that person was away.

What we did

Wrote the manual before touching the bookkeeping. Before taking on a single transaction we documented the whole operation end to end, across Unleashed and Xero: every screen, every field, every decision that had only ever been made by somebody remembering how it went last time.

That is the step most people skip, and it is the reason the rest worked. Writing it down is what made the twenty-five hours visible. Work nobody has looked at properly cannot be reduced, because nobody knows what it consists of.

Took on the sales order cycle as a subcontractor, not as an adviser. The sales team enters the order. We process it before the midday cut-off, against the order date, the delivery method, the freight rules, any promotional discount and the delivery address. Prepaid customers are held as a draft until the money arrives, then completed as usual. The distribution centre picks, packs and posts, and the tracking number flows back into the order by itself, so a customer asking where their goods are gets an answer in seconds rather than a promise to find out.

Attached the evidence to the transaction rather than to an inbox. Supplier confirmation, proof of delivery and freight paperwork live on the order itself, so the audit trail is found by opening the record rather than by asking who still has the email.

Made the debtor calls ourselves. Plenty of providers will send a debtors report. We ring the customers. A report tells you who owes you money, which you already knew; the call is the part that changes the bank balance.

The outcome

What changed

Where a figure is not on record, the change is described in words. No percentage is estimated and no metric is invented.

Around 20 hours a week Returned to the business, on the client's own reckoning. The same function now takes about a quarter of the time it did, and the hours went back into the work only the client can do.

25 to 30 hours What the same function took each week in-house, on the client's own reckoning, carried by one part-time bookkeeper with no written process.

5 to 7.5 hours What it takes each week now, run externally as a whole function rather than as a set of tasks.

Every order, before midday The daily cut-off met as a matter of routine, so a customer's delivery date stops depending on how busy the office was.

A process that survives leave Written down, handed over in days rather than months, and no longer dependent on one person being at their desk.

Is this you

When this is worth a conversation

Outsourcing tasks rarely helps, because the coordination stays with you. Outsourcing a whole function does, because the order, the invoice, the payment and the collection end up in one pair of hands. These are the questions that tell you which one you need.

Is somebody part-time carrying what is really a full-time job, and covering it by working faster rather than by changing the process?
If that person took a fortnight off tomorrow, could anybody else run the week?
Is there a written process, or is there a person who knows?
Does anyone actually ring your overdue customers, or does a debtors report get produced and then read?

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