Northbridge Consulting Group is a 22-person management consulting firm based in Edmonton. They advise mid-size Alberta businesses on operations, HR, and organizational strategy.
When they came to us, their billing process looked like this: consultants logged hours in a standalone time tracking app. A project manager exported those hours to a spreadsheet weekly. The accounting team used the spreadsheet to build invoices in QuickBooks. The CRM — a separate subscription — tracked project status independently from everything else.
Three systems. No integration. Every invoice started with someone manually reconciling three data sources.
What they needed
Not a custom integration — they had tried that. A previous developer had built a QuickBooks connector for their time tracking tool. It worked for three months, then the time tracking app updated its API and the connector broke. Nobody in-house knew how to fix it.
What they actually needed was a single system where time entry, project management, client records, invoicing, and accounting lived together — not three systems connected by a fragile bridge.
What we implemented
A 6-week Odoo implementation covering:
- Timesheets + Project — consultants log hours directly against client projects in Odoo. No separate app. No weekly export.
- CRM + Sales — client engagements are managed as Odoo sales orders. Project creation is triggered from a confirmed sale.
- Invoicing — invoices are generated directly from confirmed timesheet entries. The billable hours, the rate, and the client are already in the system. The invoice takes two clicks.
- Accounting — full replacement of QuickBooks, including chart of accounts migration, open AR migration, and Canadian tax configuration.
The result is a single source of truth: the same timesheet entry that a consultant submits on Friday appears on the client invoice on Monday and in the revenue report at month-end. No reconciliation. No discrepancy.
The outcome
Billing errors dropped to zero in the first month live. Not because the team became more careful — because the process no longer required manual data transfer between systems.
The operations director now runs her weekly billing cycle in two hours. Previously it took a full day.
The firm also gained something they had not specifically asked for: real-time project profitability. Because timesheets post costs against client projects automatically, the firm can see at any point how many hours have been logged against a project's budget — and whether they are on track to bill profitably.
Running a professional services firm on disconnected systems? Talk to us — we implement Odoo for service businesses across Alberta.