Streamlining Onboarding and Billing via FLAIR
A professional services firm deployed FLAIR to unify its onboarding and client billing workflows—eliminating the manual reconciliation between HR data and billing data that had been costing 40 hours per month in administration.
The Challenge
“The firm employed 1,200 consultants, each engaged at specific billing rates across multiple client accounts. The billing cycle required reconciling consultant hours (tracked in a project management system) against billing rates (maintained in the HR system) against client invoicing (managed in the finance system)—a three-way reconciliation that the finance team performed manually each month. The process took 40+ hours per billing cycle, frequently identified discrepancies that required HR and project management to investigate, and regularly resulted in delayed invoicing that impacted cash flow.”
The Solution
FLAIR was deployed as the integrated HR and billing data layer, connecting the firm's Workday HCM (consultant HR data and billing rates), Salesforce Professional Services Automation (project assignments and hours), and NetSuite (client invoicing). FLAIR maintains a real-time unified record of each consultant's current billing rate, project assignments, and hours worked—enabling the billing cycle to run as an automated process rather than a manual reconciliation.
Implementation
Billing Rate Data Integration
FLAIR's Workday integration maintained a real-time sync of each consultant's billing rate, effective date, and client-specific rate overrides (where a consultant's billing rate varied by client contract). When a consultant's billing rate was updated in Workday (upon promotion, renegotiation of client contract, or role change), FLAIR automatically propagated the updated rate to the billing calculation for all active projects—eliminating the billing rate discrepancies that had been the most common source of monthly reconciliation errors.
Project Hours to Invoice Automation
FLAIR's Salesforce PSA integration pulled approved project hours at period close, applying the current billing rate for each consultant-client combination to calculate the billable amount. NetSuite invoice drafts were automatically generated with itemized billing detail (consultant name, role, hours, rate, and amount) within 4 hours of period close. Finance team review was focused on exception handling—reviewing the small percentage of line items flagged by FLAIR's anomaly detection (hours significantly above or below baseline for the consultant-project combination)—rather than reviewing all line items manually.
New Hire Onboarding to Billing Setup
FLAIR's onboarding integration automated the sequence from new hire record creation in Workday to billing-ready status in NetSuite. When a new consultant's Workday record was created with role, billing rate, and project assignment, FLAIR automatically created the corresponding billing profile in NetSuite—eliminating the 3-5 day manual setup process that had previously delayed first-month billing for new hires. FLAIR also automated the equipment and system access provisioning notifications triggered by onboarding events, reducing the onboarding coordinator's manual task coordination from 45 minutes to 8 minutes per new hire.
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