Apex Advisory Group eliminated $480K in manual billing admin and cut DSO 34% with custom API integration across QuickBooks, Stripe, and HubSpot
A 60-person advisory firm was manually reconciling billing data across four disconnected tools — every invoice meant copy-pasting between HubSpot, a time-tracking app, Stripe, and QuickBooks. A custom integration platform automated the entire billing flow end-to-end and freed three full-time finance hires worth of work.
This is an illustrative case study. Company names, identifying details, and testimonials have been changed to protect client confidentiality. The technical solution and target outcomes are representative of the work we do. We extend the same confidentiality to every client.
Where they started
Apex's 60 advisors tracked time in Toggl, managed engagements in HubSpot, collected payments through Stripe, and kept the books in QuickBooks — and none of those tools talked to each other. Every invoice was a manual production: a finance clerk exported time from Toggl, cross-referenced it against the HubSpot deal record to confirm the SOW rate, created a Stripe payment link, and then re-entered the same data into QuickBooks once the payment landed. The process took 22 minutes per invoice, the four-person finance team spent 60% of its week on it, and data entry errors caused 1 in 12 invoices to go out wrong — triggering client disputes, rework, and delayed payments. Days sales outstanding sat at 58 days, and the CFO had hired two additional finance clerks in the last year just to keep up with billing volume that was growing faster than the manual process could scale.
What we built
We deployed our Integration Hub platform with custom connectors that link Toggl, HubSpot, Stripe, and QuickBooks into a single automated billing flow. Approved timesheets in Toggl now trigger the integration to look up the SOW rate in HubSpot, generate a Stripe payment link, send it to the client, and — once payment clears — create the matching invoice and revenue entry in QuickBooks automatically. Field mapping and transformation rules handle the rate logic and tax categories, and a sync monitoring dashboard shows the finance team every flow in real time with retry and error alerting so nothing silently fails. The platform went live in 6 weeks, and the entire billing flow that used to take 22 minutes per invoice now runs in under 30 seconds with zero manual data entry.
Target outcomes
More from this project
We had four people in finance and three of them were essentially human copy-paste machines between four tools. The integration took the entire billing flow and made it automatic — invoices go out the day a milestone closes, the data is right because no one re-keyed it, and we redeployed two of those hires to actual financial analysis. The DSO drop alone improved our cash position by half a million.
Representative testimonial — name and role changed to protect client identity.