Case studies — BluCat Consulting
Case studies

Fifteen problems we were handed, and what we did about them.

Every one of these started with somebody typing the same number twice, or a file nobody trusted. Clients are anonymized; the work is not.

Nonprofits, churches & schools

Seven engagements
Full service

“Don’t get rid of him.”

A nonprofit with a retail store and no reliable view of its own cash. Two years later, reporting is on time, funds pay from the right accounts, and the auditor told the board to keep us.

QuickBooks Online · Make.com · Bill.com
Accounts payable

A 58-vendor bill run, from hours to minutes

232 manual entries a month, read by eye off one small-print page — replaced with parsed data and a real approval workflow.

Docparser · Bill.com · QuickBooks Online
Cleanup & rescue

When the cleanup has already failed once

A school whose board could not rely on the numbers, after outside consultants had tried and not finished. Three years later we are still their consultant.

QuickBooks Online
Payroll accounting

Your payroll sync isn’t wrong. It’s just not detailed enough.

Allocation across programs and grants, rebuilt automatically every pay period — balanced, with rounding handled and real variances escalated to a person.

Gusto · Make.com · QuickBooks Online
Revenue recognition

Two systems, one set of books

Donor CRM campaign revenue reconciled to QuickBooks across three concurrent campaign years, with the trial balance attached to every entry.

Donor CRM · Docparser · Zapier · QuickBooks Online
Deposits

From scanned check to recorded deposit

The bank already sends the check number and amount digitally. It was being read off one screen and typed into another.

Mailparser · Zapier · QuickBooks Online
Program reporting

Two hours every morning, gone

Stripe course sales coded to the right program class automatically — with the processing fee booked separately. The first automation we ever built.

Stripe · Zapier · QuickBooks Online

Contractors & trades

Three builds
Operational systems · Airtable

Every job lives in one place now. The spreadsheet did not.

Jobs, crews, permits and quotes out of a Google Sheet and into a base that sorts — including the quotes that used to go cold unnoticed.

Airtable · QuickBooks Online · QuickBooks Time
Job costing

Job costing without the data entry

Consigned inventory pulls, returns, and counter purchases across multiple suppliers — landing on the right project the day they happen.

Docparser · Zapier · QuickBooks Online Projects
Time & billing

When one project generates fourteen time entries

Fragmented timesheets consolidated by employee and project — with every original archived before anything is deleted.

QuickBooks Time · Make.com

Retail, restaurant & e-commerce

Three builds
Revenue reconciliation

Why POS sales don't always match QuickBooks

Daily syncs create timing differences and someone fixes them monthly. We built the books from the POS system’s own report instead.

Popular POS systems for retailers and restaurants · Mailparser · Docparser · Zapier
Revenue reconciliation

We turned off the POS integration on purpose

One monthly journal entry per client, built from the POS report, with the source document attached to the entry.

Popular POS systems for retailers and restaurants · Docparser · Zapier · QuickBooks Online
Fulfillment automation

One click replaced a form, a manual order, and a shelf of stock

A vendor that couldn’t connect to anything meant manual orders and inventory nobody was supposed to be holding. Cost per item fell about 60%.

WooCommerce · Stripe · Zapier

Professional services

Two engagements
Full service · Five years in

“I’m not sure what to do with my time now”

A Florida land surveying firm handed off its whole back office. A revenue climb, one honest downturn, and an ownership change later, the engagement is still running.

QuickBooks Online Projects · Bill.com · Airtable
Operational systems · Airtable

“I’m flying through this effortlessly with what used to take hours”

Hundreds of projects out of Excel, reports and invoices out of Word, and lab data loading straight into the record both are generated from.

Airtable · Laboratory data integration
The signature of this problem

Your project tracker is a spreadsheet, your deliverables are Word documents, and the same information gets typed into both.

Also built, write-ups pending

Class registration to invoice and payment

A new registration creates the customer, the invoice and the payment in QuickBooks, with a lookup supplying pricing and revenue category.

Booking Guru · Google Sheets · QuickBooks Online

Airtable project management bases

Operational bases beyond the environmental consulting build. Several are live; we are choosing which to write up.

Airtable

If the same number is being typed twice, there is an automation waiting there.

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