How Westbridge Used Lateral to Cut Billing Cycle by 75% and Freed Up $1.6M in Cash

The Challenge

Sarah Chen, CFO at Westbridge, had watched the firm grow from 120 consultants to 220 over three years. Revenue had nearly doubled to $112M. But her finance team had grown from 6 to 9 people—and they were still drowning.

"Every month was the same scramble," Sarah recalls. "Chase consultants for time entries. Wait for project managers to review. Route pre-bills to partners. Make adjustments. By the time invoices went out, we were 20-22 days past month-end. Clients had moved on mentally, which made collections harder."

The finance team was spending 80% of their time on transactional work—processing time entries, reviewing expense reports, generating invoices, reconciling project costs. Strategic work like profitability analysis and forecasting got squeezed into whatever time was left.

"My Controller came to me and said we need to hire three more people," Sarah explains. "Two for billing and one for project accounting. I did the math—that's $240K annually. And in two years when we hit 300 consultants, we'd need to hire three more after that. The finance team would be 15 people. It was unsustainable."

The Solution

Sarah heard about Lateral from another consulting firm at a CFO roundtable. The phrase that caught her attention: "We're processing 3x the volume with the same finance team size."

Westbridge deployed Lateral in March 2024, starting with the Billing Agent and Project Accounting Agent. The implementation took 7 weeks and required mapping out rate cards, billing arrangements, approval workflows, and project cost allocation rules.

"We have 40+ different rate structures depending on partner, practice area, client relationship, and contract type," Sarah explains. "I was skeptical that software could handle that complexity. But the agents learned our rules and actually apply them more consistently than humans did."

The Results

Month 1:

• Billing cycle reduced to 12 days (from 20-22 days)

• Agents drafted pre-bills automatically, partners reviewed everything

• Several errors caught during partner review—agents learned from corrections

Month 3:

• Billing cycle down to 7 days

• Partners trusting agent-generated pre-bills, only reviewing high-value items

• Project profitability reports available in real-time

Current state (Month 9):

• Billing cycle consistently 5-6 days

• Partners get real-time project P&L data for staffing decisions

• Finance team handles 2.5x the transaction volume with same headcount

Quantifiable impact:

• Avoided hiring 4 planned finance roles ($280K+ annual savings)

• DSO improved from 58 days to 43 days (15-day improvement)

• $1.6M freed up in working capital

• Finance team morale dramatically improved

• Partner satisfaction with finance up 45%

The Impact

"The transformation isn't just about cost savings," Sarah emphasizes. "My finance team is finally doing finance work. They're analyzing project profitability, identifying trends, helping partners make pricing decisions. One of my senior accountants told me last month this is the first time in her career she's felt like a strategic partner to the business instead of a transaction processor."

The real-time project data changed how partners manage the business.