The Challenge
Atlas Consulting Group is a privately held management consulting firm with 600 employees — including 280 senior consultants, 160 analysts, 85 support staff, and 75 partners — spread across five offices in Chicago, New York, Boston, Dallas, and San Francisco. The firm specializes in operational transformation and technology strategy for mid-market companies, a practice that generates roughly $185 million in annual revenue. Consulting is a business that runs on two things: talent and financial discipline. Atlas had the first one covered. The second was falling apart.
The finance operation at Atlas was built on a legacy accounting system that had been installed nine years earlier, when the firm had two offices and 180 employees. As Atlas tripled in size and expanded to five entities — one per office, each with its own P&L — the system never kept pace. Month-end close had ballooned into a 12-business-day ordeal. The four-person finance team spent the first several days chasing down intercompany transactions between the five entities, manually reconciling balances in spreadsheets that had grown to over 40 tabs. Journal entries were keyed by hand. Consolidation required exporting data from each entity's ledger into a master spreadsheet, where a senior accountant manually eliminated intercompany balances and applied currency adjustments for the San Francisco entity's Canadian client billings. A single transposition error in week one of the close could cascade through the entire consolidation and cost the team two days of rework.
Accounts payable was equally strained. Atlas processed approximately 1,400 vendor invoices per month — covering everything from subcontractor fees and software licenses to office leases and travel vendors. Every invoice arrived as a PDF attachment or, in some cases, paper mail. An AP clerk manually entered each invoice into the accounting system: vendor name, invoice number, line items, GL coding, amount, due date. The process averaged 22 minutes per invoice. Including supervisor review, exception handling, and payment processing, the fully loaded cost of processing a single invoice was $18. At 1,400 invoices per month, Atlas was spending roughly $302,000 annually just to pay its bills. Duplicate payments, while infrequent, occurred at a rate of about 0.8% — eleven or twelve per month — costing the firm an average of $14,000 in monthly overpayments that had to be identified and recovered after the fact.
Expense reimbursement was the issue that consultants felt most personally. Atlas consultants travel heavily — the firm's annual T&E spend exceeds $9 million — and the existing expense process was a source of persistent frustration. Consultants were required to collect physical receipts, complete a desktop-only expense report template, attach scanned receipt images, and submit the package to their project manager for approval. Approved reports then moved to the finance team for coding, review, and payment. The average turnaround from submission to reimbursement was five business days, but reports with missing receipts or coding errors — roughly 30% of all submissions — could take two weeks or longer. Consultants who were already billing 50 or more hours per week had little patience for chasing down receipt images from a dinner three weeks prior. In the firm's most recent employee satisfaction survey, expense reimbursement was rated the single lowest-scoring administrative process, with a satisfaction score of 2.1 out of 5.
Partners, meanwhile, were operating largely in the dark. Project profitability — the single most important financial metric in a consulting firm — was not available in real time. The finance team produced project margin reports monthly, but by the time those reports were finalized at the end of the 12-day close, the data was already three to four weeks stale. Partners making staffing decisions, pricing proposals, and client negotiations had no current view of which engagements were profitable and which were hemorrhaging margin. A partner who wanted to know the current margin on a $2 million strategy engagement had two options: wait for month-end reporting or build a personal spreadsheet. Most chose the latter, which meant that the firm had dozens of conflicting profitability estimates circulating at any given time.
The Solution
Atlas Consulting's CFO, Megan Aldridge, had been flagging the finance infrastructure problem to the executive committee for over a year. When the firm lost a full week of the March close to a consolidation error that required restatement of two entities' intercompany balances, the committee authorized a platform evaluation. Aldridge's requirements were specific: the new system had to handle multi-entity accounting natively, automate AP processing without adding headcount, deliver real-time financial visibility to partners, and make expense reporting painless enough that consultants would actually comply with T&E policies. After evaluating four platforms, Atlas selected Workisy's integrated finance suite.
Workisy's General Ledger module was configured for Atlas's five-entity structure with a redesigned chart of accounts that standardized GL coding across all offices. The legacy system had allowed each office to create its own account codes over the years, resulting in five slightly different charts of accounts that made consolidation an exercise in manual mapping. Workisy's unified chart eliminated that problem entirely. Intercompany transactions were configured to generate automatic elimination entries during consolidation, removing the manual spreadsheet reconciliation that had been the single largest time sink in the close process. The system's multi-currency capabilities handled the Canadian-dollar billings from the San Francisco office without manual conversion or adjustment entries.
The Accounts Payable module introduced AI-powered invoice capture that fundamentally changed how Atlas processed vendor bills. Invoices arriving by email were automatically ingested, and the AI engine extracted vendor details, line items, amounts, GL codes, and payment terms with an accuracy rate that exceeded 94% on first pass. The system matched invoices against purchase orders where applicable and flagged potential duplicates by cross-referencing vendor, amount, and date against the existing invoice database. A three-tier approval workflow was configured based on invoice amount and department, routing each invoice to the appropriate approver's mobile device for review. Approved invoices flowed directly into the GL and payment queue without any manual re-entry.
Financial Reporting was configured with a library of real-time dashboards tailored to Atlas's three key audiences. The finance team received operational dashboards tracking close progress, outstanding reconciliation items, and cash position across all five entities. Partners received project profitability dashboards showing revenue, direct costs, allocated overhead, and margin for every active engagement, updated continuously as transactions posted to the ledger. The executive committee received a consolidated P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow view with drill-down capability to any entity or cost center. Every report pulled from the live ledger — no batch exports, no stale data, no conflicting spreadsheet versions.
The Expense Management module replaced the desktop-only template with a mobile-first workflow designed around how consultants actually work. Consultants could photograph a receipt with their phone immediately after a meal or cab ride, and the system's OCR engine extracted the merchant, amount, date, and category automatically. Expenses were categorized against the appropriate project code based on the consultant's active engagement assignments, and mileage was calculated from GPS data for ground travel. Approval routing was configured to match Atlas's delegation of authority matrix, with automatic escalation for expenses exceeding project-level thresholds. Approved expenses flowed into the GL and the reimbursement queue in a single step.
The critical advantage of selecting all four modules from a single platform was the elimination of data silos. In the legacy environment, AP data lived in one system, expense data in another, and the GL required manual imports from both. With Workisy, every transaction — whether a vendor invoice, an expense receipt, or an intercompany transfer — posted to the GL in real time through native integrations. There were no batch imports, no reconciliation files, and no overnight syncs. The finance team gained a single source of truth that every report, dashboard, and analysis drew from.
The Implementation
Atlas and Workisy agreed on a 12-week phased implementation designed to minimize disruption to the firm's ongoing operations and ensure that each module was fully stabilized before the next one went live.
Weeks one through four focused on the General Ledger migration and chart of accounts redesign. Workisy's implementation team worked with Atlas's senior accountant and controller to map the five legacy charts of accounts into a single unified structure with 340 accounts organized across revenue, direct cost, overhead, and balance sheet categories. Historical data — 24 months of transactional detail — was migrated into the new ledger to preserve trend analysis and year-over-year comparability. The intercompany elimination rules were configured and tested using three months of historical consolidation data, with the Workisy output reconciled against Atlas's audited financials to confirm accuracy. Two full trial closes were run in parallel with the legacy system before the GL was declared production-ready.
Weeks five through eight tackled AP automation. The first step was vendor onboarding: Atlas's top 120 vendors by invoice volume — representing 82% of total AP transactions — were configured in the system with their standard payment terms, GL coding defaults, and approval routing rules. The AI invoice capture engine was trained on a sample set of 500 historical invoices from these vendors, reaching a 94.3% first-pass accuracy rate by the end of the training period. The remaining 6% of invoices required minor manual corrections, primarily on line-item descriptions and GL coding for unusual expense categories. The three-tier approval workflow was tested with the full finance team and a pilot group of 15 department heads before being rolled out firm-wide.
Weeks nine through twelve brought Expense Management and Financial Reporting online simultaneously. Expense Management launched with a firm-wide rollout to all 600 employees, supported by a 30-minute virtual training session and a quick-start guide distributed through the company intranet. Adoption was immediate: within the first two weeks, 89% of expense reports were submitted through the mobile app. Financial Reporting was configured in collaboration with the partner group, who provided input on the specific metrics, drill-down paths, and alert thresholds they needed in their project profitability dashboards. The finance team's operational dashboards were built to track close milestones, outstanding journal entries, and reconciliation status in real time, effectively turning the month-end close from a black box into a transparent, trackable process.
Training was segmented by role. The four-person finance team received 30 hours of intensive training across all four modules, covering everything from daily transaction processing to month-end close procedures, reporting configuration, and audit trail management. The 75 partners received a focused three-hour session on the financial reporting dashboards and expense approval workflows. All 600 employees received expense management training through the virtual session, supplemented by on-demand video tutorials for common tasks like receipt capture, mileage logging, and report submission.
The Results
The impact on month-end close was dramatic and immediate. The first full close cycle after go-live completed in 4.5 days. By the third month, the team had refined their close checklist and workflow to the point where the process consistently finished in 3.5 business days — a 70% reduction from the 12-day legacy cycle. The gains came from three sources. First, automated intercompany eliminations removed approximately three days of manual spreadsheet reconciliation. Second, real-time transaction posting from AP and Expense Management meant that the GL was substantially complete before the close process even began, rather than requiring days of catch-up entries. Third, automated journal entries for recurring items — depreciation, prepaid amortization, accruals — eliminated roughly 60 manual entries per month that had previously required individual preparation, review, and posting.
AP processing costs fell from $18.00 per invoice to $6.30 — a 65% reduction. The AI invoice capture engine handled initial data extraction for all 1,400 monthly invoices, reducing the average human touch time from 22 minutes to under 7 minutes per invoice. Duplicate invoice detection caught an average of 14 potential duplicates per month before payment, compared to the 11 or 12 that had previously slipped through and required after-the-fact recovery. The elimination of duplicate payments alone saved Atlas approximately $168,000 annually. Total AP cost savings, including reduced processing time, eliminated duplicate payments, and early payment discounts that the team now had time to capture, reached $196,000 per year.
Expense reimbursement turnaround collapsed from five business days to an average of eight hours. The mobile submission workflow meant that consultants submitted expenses in real time rather than batching them at the end of the month. Automated categorization and project coding eliminated the back-and-forth that had previously delayed 30% of reports. Managers received approval requests on their phones and could review and approve expenses between meetings. The finance team's role shifted from manual coding and error correction to exception review — only 6% of expense reports now required any human intervention beyond one-click approval. In the follow-up employee satisfaction survey conducted four months after launch, expense reimbursement scores jumped from 2.1 to 4.4 out of 5, the largest single-category improvement in the survey's history.
The partner dashboards transformed financial decision-making at the firm. For the first time, partners could see real-time margin data on every active engagement. Within the first quarter, partners identified three engagements that were running below target margin due to scope creep that hadn't been reflected in billing adjustments. The combined revenue recovery from repricing those engagements was $310,000. Partners also began using the profitability data to inform proposal pricing, resulting in more accurate project budgets and fewer margin surprises after engagement kickoff.
In total, Atlas quantified $420,000 in annual cost savings from the combined deployment: $196,000 from AP processing improvements, $112,000 from reduced close-cycle labor and overtime, $78,000 from the elimination of manual reporting and spreadsheet maintenance, and $34,000 from recovered early payment discounts. The revenue recovery from improved project profitability visibility, while not included in the cost savings figure, represented additional upside that the firm expected to compound as partners became more fluent with the real-time dashboards.
What's Next
Atlas Consulting is planning to add Workisy's Accounts Receivable module in Q3 2026 to automate client billing. The current billing process — where project managers prepare invoices in Word documents that are reviewed by partners and manually entered into the accounting system — shares many of the same inefficiencies that plagued AP before automation. Aldridge estimates that AR automation will reduce billing cycle time from 10 days to 3 days, accelerating cash collection and improving working capital.
The firm is also exploring integration between Workisy's finance suite and its project management system to enable automated job costing. The goal is to have consultant time entries flow directly from the PM tool into Workisy's GL as project cost entries, eliminating the monthly manual allocation process that currently requires two full days of finance team effort. Once job costing is automated, Atlas intends to build predictive margin models that flag at-risk engagements before profitability erodes, giving partners the ability to intervene on pricing and staffing decisions weeks earlier than the current reporting cadence allows.
Client Quote
"In a consulting firm, your financials aren't just a compliance obligation — they're a management tool. When it takes 12 days to close the books, you're making decisions with last month's data, and in a business where a single engagement can swing from 40% margin to breakeven in a matter of weeks, that delay is expensive. Workisy didn't just speed up our close. It gave us a financial infrastructure that actually matches the speed at which our business operates. Partners now have real-time project margins on their phones. Consultants get reimbursed the same day they submit expenses. Our AP team processes twice the invoice volume in half the time. The $420,000 in hard savings is real, but the value of having accurate, current financial data when you're pricing a $3 million engagement or deciding whether to staff up on an account — that's where the real return lives."
Megan Aldridge, Chief Financial Officer, Atlas Consulting Group