One Dashboard, Three Systems: Giving a 60-Person Accounting Firm Real-Time Visibility
What was slowing them down.
A growing accounting firm had CRM data in Salesforce, time-tracking in Harvest, and billing in QuickBooks — three systems with no connection between them. Every month, a senior analyst spent six hours manually pulling exports, combining them in Excel, and formatting a partner utilization report. The report was always 10 days late, occasionally contained errors, and by the time partners received it, the data was already stale. Leadership had no real-time view of staff utilization, project profitability, or billing realization.
The solution.
We built a lightweight data warehouse on Google BigQuery that ingests data from all three systems nightly via API connectors. A transformation layer normalizes the data into a consistent schema — matching time entries to projects, projects to clients, and billing to realized revenue. We built two Power BI dashboards: an operational view updated daily for practice managers, and a strategic view updated weekly for partners. The partner utilization report that previously took six hours to compile now regenerates automatically overnight.
- Monthly partner utilization report now generates automatically — 8 minutes vs 6 hours of manual effort
- Partners received real-time dashboards for the first time, improving billing realization by 14% in Q1
- Identified three under-billed client engagements worth a combined $47,000 in unbilled revenue
- Senior analyst reallocated from reporting to client advisory work
“I used to dread the end of month because I knew it meant two days of Excel misery. Now I open the dashboard before my morning coffee and the numbers are already there. The partners can't imagine going back.”
Senior Business Analyst
Mid-Size Accounting Firm, Atlanta
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