Industry: Talent Strategy & Recruiting
Firm Size: 51-200 Employees
Main Use Cases: Fixed Fee Invoicing, Revenue Attribution, Timekeeping, Workflow Automation, QuickBooks Integration
Overview
Titus Talent Strategies is a mission-driven talent strategy firm that partners with organizations to hire, train and retain attract, hire, and retain top talent to maximize their impact. Known for its consultative approach and blend of recruitment and talent advisory services, Titus had outgrown the capabilities of their previous PSA system. The team was burdened by operational inefficiencies, particularly around bulk invoicing and tracking performance across hybrid billing models.
In 2022, after struggling to fit their invoicing processing into a competitor’s limited functionality, Titus returned to BigTime to regain stability and scalability. The impact was transformative. With BigTime’s flexibility, robust reporting, and seamless integrations, Titus built an entirely new workflow for fixed fee revenue, automated large portions of their invoicing, and empowered their lean billing team to deliver accuracy at scale. All without sacrificing visibility or internal bonus alignment.
Challenges Before BigTime
Breakdown in Bulk Invoicing
Titus initially left BigTime in 2015 to explore other options for bulk invoicing. But after years on a competitor’s platform, they experienced increasing system failures. In the final state, only 10 invoices could be sent at a time—untenable for a firm generating 350-400 invoices monthly.
Manual, Error-Prone Approval Process
Invoice approvals in their prior software was handled via email, making tracking, auditing, and accountability extremely difficult.
Missed Deliveries and Invoicing Errors
Contacts would routinely receive the wrong invoices, and platform issues compounded delivery problems with no responsive support from their vendor.
Inflexible Reporting and Lack of Audit Trail
Their prior vendor offered no in-product report building, making custom analytics impossible. In contrast, Titus needed granular insight into recruiter efficiency, cost-to-serve, and project-level profitability.
The BigTime Solution
A Strategic Return to BigTime
In late 2022, Titus re-evaluated BigTime’s capabilities and found significant product maturity, especially in bulk invoicing, audit traceability, and admin tools. The modernized UI and real-time reporting immediately addressed past frustrations and provided a scalable base for innovation.
Innovative Use of BigTime with Custom Automation
As Titus shifted from hourly billing to fixed fee engagements in 2024, they worked with BigTime and other solutions in their tech stack—including monday.com and Zapier—to build a custom proration engine:
- Automated Revenue Entries: Projects were managed in monday.com, where proration was calculated. Then, Zapier automatically created standardized time entries in BigTime (e.g., 1 entry for each quarter of a month billed), preserving existing reporting pipelines.
- Non-Person-Based Billing: Time entries were tied to placeholder users, enabling seamless draft generation and fast adjustment (e.g., reduce from 100% to 75% by deleting 1 entry).
- Fast, Accurate Invoice Review: With only four possible “time” entries per project, errors were minimized and approval turnaround was dramatically shortened, an essential win for their one-person invoicing team.
Deep Custom Reporting to Align Revenue and Compensation
Even as Titus moved away from time tracking, they preserved their bonus structure by embedding metadata in time entry notes (e.g., project, recruiter, revenue share). This enabled:
- Granular Revenue Attribution: Exporting BigTime reports into Excel allowed detailed revenue splitting across recruiters and account managers.
- Performance Visibility Without Timesheets: Though time wasn’t tracked for fixed fee projects, revenue-per-search became a new benchmark for team efficiency and value delivery.
Results
By implementing BigTime as the foundation of their custom billing and reporting workflow, Titus achieved:
- Increased Invoice Accuracy & Speed: Dramatic reduction in billing errors and fewer manual corrections, even while issuing 300+ monthly invoices.
- Sustainable Workflow with Minimal Staff: One team member now handles invoicing for 200+ clients monthly, aided by automation and simplified review processes.
- Improved Bonus Plan Execution: Revenue tracking for 120+ staff is now automated through BigTime’s reporting exports, critical for aligning comp plans with evolving billing models.
- Strategic Reporting at Scale: Titus uses BigTime to generate ad hoc and monthly performance reports, informing decisions across recruiting efficiency, pricing accuracy, and service profitability.
