How a Consulting Firm Freed Up 15 Hours a Month After a Back-Office Restructure

Sam's List Editorial | 2026-06-06

How a Consulting Firm Freed Up 15 Hours a Month After a Back-Office Restructure The managing principal of a 12-person consulting firm was spending 15 hours a month on financial administration. He knew it was too much. He couldn't figure out where to cut. The problem wasn't that he was doing things that shouldn't be done — it was that his back office had been built for a five-person firm and never scaled. Two billing systems running in parallel. No project-level P&L. Time entries that had to be manually matched to invoices every billing cycle because the systems didn't talk to each other. After System Six restructured the back office, the same work that had taken 15 hours took under two hours. The time savings were significant. The strategic insight that came with it was more valuable. The Client and the Situation The firm was a 12-person management consulting practice at $3.2 million in annual revenue. It had grown organically from a solo practice, adding staff as client demand grew, and the back-office infrastructure had been added reactively rather than designed intentionally. The team was talented at client delivery. The business operations were a patchwork. A solo bookkeeper handled accounts payable and payroll. The managing principal personally reviewed billing, handled client billing disputes, ran the month-end close, and produced P&L reports from a combination of QuickBooks exports and manually updated spreadsheets. The 15+ hours per month estimate was conservative. During peak billing cycles — end of quarter, project closeouts, renewal negotiations — it ran higher. There was no CFO. The managing principal served that function, on vetted of established client engagements, managing staff, and handling business development. The math on his time was unsustainable. What System Six Found The diagnostic phase took three weeks and involved a full review of the chart of accounts, billing workflow, time-tracking setup, and month-end close process. Two Billing Systems, Neither Tied to the GL The firm was running two billing software platforms simultaneously. The first had been implemented three years earlier. The second was added when a client required a specific invoice format that the first platform couldn't produce. Over time, different clients ended up on different systems, and no one wanted to migrate the relationship-sensitive billing history. Neither system fed directly into QuickBooks. Revenue was entered manually into the GL from PDF invoices after the fact — typically two to three weeks after billing, creating a persistent lag between when work was done...