An 11-day invoice cycle, cut to four hours
Orders arrived by email, were re-keyed into a shared spreadsheet, printed for approval, then re-keyed again into accounting. Nobody could say what was unbilled without opening four files and asking two people.
- 01 · Intake
It starts in an inbox. Orders arrive as email, in whatever shape the customer felt like sending them, and the queue is whoever happens to be reading.
- 02 · Re-key
Someone retypes each one into a shared spreadsheet. There are seven versions of that file, and the live one is whichever was opened last.
- 03 · Paper approval
Approval is printed, signed by hand, and walked back to a desk. The only record that a decision happened is the piece of paper it happened on.
- 04 · Re-key, again
Then the same numbers are typed a second time into accounting, by a different person, into a different system. This is where the two systems of record start to disagree.
- 05 · The build
Six steps become four, in one system. An order becomes a queued job, gets approved in place, and lands in the ledger without anyone retyping anything.
Fig. 05a — Order-to-invoice path, before and after. Drawn from the client's own process map.