Case Study: Eliminating 2 Hours of Daily Manual Invoicing for an Events Company

The Challenge

A growing events company was managing its workforce through Onsinch, a dedicated staffing and scheduling platform, while running its finances through Xero. The two systems had no connection between them.

Every working day, a member of the finance team manually re-keyed the day's billable work from Onsinch into Xero - roughly 200 line items spread across 10 to 15 invoices. Each line had to be transcribed, matched to the right client and project, and checked before the invoice could be raised.

Why did this happen? Like many SMEs, the company had adopted best-of-breed tools at different stages of growth: Onsinch to manage shifts and staff, and Xero to run the books. Each tool did its own job well, but neither vendor had any incentive to bridge the gap between them. The manual re-keying was never a deliberate decision - it was the seam that quietly opened up between two systems that were never designed to talk to each other. As volume grew, so did the daily burden.

Our Solution

Rather than replace either system, we built the missing connection between them. We mapped exactly how line items in Onsinch corresponded to invoice lines in Xero, including how clients, projects and rates needed to be matched.

We then built an automated integration that pulls each day's completed work from Onsinch and creates the corresponding invoice line items in Xero - correctly coded and ready for review. A human still approves and issues the invoices, so the finance team keeps full control while losing the data entry.

The whole integration was delivered in a week. Implementation was fast because we worked entirely with the systems the company already owned - no new software to buy and no change to how staff log their work.

Results

Time Savings:

• Around 2 hours of manual data entry eliminated every working day
• Approximately 480 hours reclaimed annually (based on ~240 working days)
• At a loaded cost of £35/hour for the finance administrator, this represented roughly £16,800 in annual cost savings

Cost Savings:

• ~£16,800 per year in recovered finance time
• Reduced rework and fewer client billing queries, lowering the hidden cost of correcting and re-issuing invoices

Business Impact:

• Around 200 line items per day now flow automatically, with no manual transcription
• Invoices are raised faster, improving cash flow and reducing the lag between work delivered and work billed
• Transcription errors and mis-coded line items effectively eliminated, increasing billing accuracy
• The finance team refocused on review, exceptions and higher-value work rather than copy-typing
• A scalable foundation: invoice volume can grow without adding finance headcount

ROI: Delivered in a single week, with no ongoing software costs and minimal maintenance, the integration pays back the engagement within weeks and continues compounding savings every working day.

Key Takeaway

The most expensive problems are often the ones nobody decided to create. When best-of-breed tools don't talk to each other, the gap gets filled by hand - quietly, daily, and at growing cost. Bridging that seam is usually faster and cheaper than the manual workaround it replaces.