Client Details
- Market: US, Global
- Industry Vertical: Marketing Agency
- Objective: Transform a manual, time-intensive GMP billing process into a streamlined, automated workflow that improves efficiency, accuracy, and scalability.
- Primary Goal: Significantly reduce the time required for monthly billing preparation by automating data processing, pricing logic, and invoice generation.
- Secondary Goals:
- Improve billing accuracy by minimising manual intervention and reducing human error
- Enable faster visibility of financial performance, including monthly gross profit
- Standardise processes across clients with varying pricing structures
- Create a scalable foundation for future finance automation and operational efficiency improvements
Streamlining GMP Billing Through Intelligent Automation
Helix Growth led the design and delivery of an automated GMP billing solution for a global marketing agency, transforming a highly manual and time-intensive finance process into a streamlined, scalable workflow.
The challenge:
- Billing preparation required ~3 days per month, creating a significant operational burden
- Google invoice data was complex and inconsistently structured, requiring manual cleaning
- Client-specific pricing and tiered rate models made standardisation difficult
- Lack of a centralised process increased inefficiency and risk of error
The approach:
- Designed a Google Sheets-based automation framework to standardise the process end-to-end
- Cleaned and restructured raw invoice data into a consistent format
- Built a dynamic pricing engine to apply client-specific rates and tiers automatically
- Created a central lookup system to manage client configurations in one place
- Automated generation of finance-system-ready outputs, reducing manual handling
The results:
- Reduced billing preparation time from 3 days to ~10 minutes per platform
- Improved billing accuracy by removing manual calculations and reducing human error
- Enabled faster access to monthly financial performance and GP visibility
- Freed up finance team capacity to focus on higher-value, strategic work
- Established a scalable foundation for ongoing finance automation and process improvement