Automate Time Tracking and Billing for Your Firm

Most professional services firms use a patchwork of tools. Time is logged in Harvest or Toggl, contracts live as PDFs in HubSpot or another CRM, and invoices are created in QuickBooks. While each tool works well for its core function, the connections between them are manual and fragile. This creates a significant operational bottleneck at the end of every month.

Consider a 15-person consulting firm. An operations manager exports a CSV from Toggl containing hundreds of time entries. They must then open the SOW for each project in HubSpot to verify which tasks are billable, what the correct rate is, and if any spending caps have been reached. This cross-referencing process takes hours and is prone to error. A single mistake, like billing for out-of-scope work, can damage client trust.

The final step is manually creating line items in QuickBooks, copy-pasting descriptions and totals from a spreadsheet. This entire workflow, from export to invoice creation, can consume over 16 hours of a skilled employee's time. The process is slow, error-prone, and provides zero real-time visibility into project profitability or budget burn.

The structural problem is that the business logic lives outside the software. Your SOW contains the rules, but your time tracker and accounting software are unaware of them. Off-the-shelf connectors can move data, but they cannot interpret contract terms like 'bill up to 40 hours per month at $175/hr for development tasks only.' This gap requires human intervention, which is expensive and unreliable.

The engagement would begin with a complete audit of your current workflow. Syntora would map every tool and data source, from the time tracking platform to your CRM and accounting system. The goal is to create a precise data flow diagram that identifies every manual step. You would receive this diagram, which becomes the blueprint for the automation system.

The core of the solution would be a custom FastAPI service that acts as a central rules engine. This service would use the Claude API to read and parse your SOWs, extracting key terms like rates, caps, and billable activities, then storing them in a Supabase database. An AWS Lambda function would run on a schedule, pulling raw time entries, applying the SOW rules from Supabase, and preparing clean, billable data.

The delivered system connects directly to your existing software stack. It generates draft invoices in QuickBooks with all line items pre-filled, validated, and linked back to the source time entries. Your team's role shifts from tedious data entry to a quick 15-minute final review and approval. You receive the full Python source code and a runbook detailing how the system operates.