Integrated Business OS

Challenge

The firm sells work delivered by its own staff, partners and vendors, and pays partners a commission on every contract. Sales records and finance records were kept apart, so the same deal showed different numbers in different views, and margins, fees and commissions were sometimes wrong. Every bank movement also had to be accounted for.

Our approach

We built one application that carries a deal from lead to proposal, contract, monthly invoice, payment and ledger on a single set of records. Proposals copy catalogue prices, so later price changes never alter a signed deal. Each contract names up to seven partner roles with a percentage each. A month’s amounts are calculated once when it is invoiced and then locked. When the client pays, vendor costs, the company’s margin and every commission are posted to the ledger as one batch. The ledger is append-only: a cancelled month is undone by equal and opposite entries, never by editing. Bank lines are explained against clients or accounts, clients can hold prepaid funds, and vendors and clients see read-only pages through private links. We checked the money paths with formal models and property tests to find double-posting and rounding defects. The system is in daily use, with more than 30 users and over USD 500,000 processed.