Case Study: Backstop Solutions triples profit margins and streamlines billing with Oracle NetSuite OpenAir

NetSuite Helps Professional Services Group Triple Profit Margins with Process Automation

Backstop Solutions Group, a Chicago-based financial software firm, struggled to scale its professional services because it relied on a home-grown XPTracker system and Excel spreadsheets. Manual project management, lack of real-time visibility into billable time and expenses, limited project history for estimating, and lengthy monthly timesheet reconciliation made forecasting profitability and responding to client inquiries slow and error-prone.

By implementing NetSuite OpenAir, Backstop automated time capture, differentiated billable vs. non-billable work, used backlog reporting to prioritize projects, and applied flexible billing rules for complex multi-client engagements. The results: professional services profit margins tripled, billable time per consultant rose by about 100 hours per quarter, monthly invoicing fell from two days to roughly 1.5 hours, budget reports that took up to two hours now run in minutes, timesheets moved from monthly to weekly, and client satisfaction improved.

Backstop Solutions