Eighteen people, thirty-plus active client projects, and finally — accurate billing
For most creative agencies, billing is the unglamorous backroom work that nobody went to design school to deal with. Invoices are cobbled together from time-tracking apps, spreadsheet exports, and memory. Disputes with clients are common. Revenue leakage — billable hours that were worked but never invoiced — is routine. Nobody is proud of it, but it persists because the tools never quite fit the way creative work actually happens.
Meridian Design Agency is an eighteen-person brand and digital design studio working with clients across retail, hospitality, and financial services. They bill on retainer, project, and time-and-materials structures simultaneously, sometimes all three within a single client relationship. Before Pulse, managing that complexity meant a full-time administrative burden that fell on two account managers and, quietly, on the creative leads who were supposed to be doing design work.
“I was spending four to six hours every month just preparing invoices,” said Chloe Svensson, Meridian’s Senior Account Manager. “And I still wasn’t confident the numbers were right. We’d miss things. A revision round that ran long. A workshop that went over scope. Those hours would just disappear.”
The spreadsheet era: accurate enough until it wasn’t
Meridian’s previous workflow centred on a shared time-tracking tool and a master billing spreadsheet that Chloe and her colleague Jamie maintained. Each week, team members would log hours in the tracker. Each month, Chloe would export those hours, cross-reference them against project scopes in a separate document, apply the correct billing rates (which varied by client, role, and contract type), flag anything that looked anomalous, and produce an invoice.
The process worked — until it didn’t. When a designer moved from one project to another mid-week, their hours sometimes ended up on the wrong project code. When a project went over scope, determining exactly when it crossed the line (and who had done what after that point) required forensic reconstruction. When a client questioned a line item, answering them meant digging through weeks of raw time entries and hoping the context was still legible.
“Our error rate on invoices was probably around 8%,” said Marcus Reyes, Meridian’s Managing Director. “Some errors were in our favour, most weren’t. Combined, we estimated we were under-billing by roughly £2,200 per month. Over a year, that’s real money.”
Moving to Pulse: time tracking as a byproduct of project work
Meridian adopted Pulse in March 2024 after a recommendation from another agency in their professional network. The key feature that drove the decision was Pulse’s integrated time tracking — not as a separate app requiring manual entry, but as a native layer on top of project tasks. When a designer starts working on a task in Pulse, a timer is available directly in the task view. Time logged against tasks automatically flows into project-level billing reports, already tagged with the correct client, project, and role rate.
“The difference is that time tracking is no longer a separate behaviour,” said Freya Koch, Meridian’s Design Director. “It’s just part of working in Pulse. You open the task, you start the timer, you stop it when you’re done. It takes two extra clicks. People actually do it.”
Compliance with time logging — a persistent problem with the previous system — jumped from around 65% of hours logged in the old tool to 94% in Pulse within the first month. The improvement wasn’t driven by policy changes or reminders; it was driven by the reduced friction of the interface.
Outcomes after seven months
- Monthly invoicing preparation time reduced from 4–6 hours to 45 minutes per billing cycle
- Time logging compliance up from 65% to 94% of all billable hours
- Revenue recovery: average monthly billing increased by £2,600 due to hours that were previously unlogged or miscategorised
- Client invoice disputes down 83% — Pulse’s per-task time breakdown gives clients auditable line-item detail on request
- Over-scope detection: Pulse flagged 11 projects approaching scope limits before they crossed over, enabling proactive client conversations in all 11 cases
What the team says
For Chloe, the change to invoicing has been the most tangible improvement. “I used to dread the end of the month,” she said. “Now I generate the billing report in Pulse, review it in about twenty minutes, and send the invoices. If a client questions something, I can show them exactly which task, which day, which team member. There’s nothing to argue about.”
For the creative team, the impact is less about billing and more about visibility. Freya described the before-state as one where designers often didn’t know whether a project was profitable, over-scoped, or being delivered efficiently. “Now everyone can see their project’s health,” she said. “If we’re burning budget faster than expected, the whole team knows early enough to do something about it.”
Marcus summed up the shift simply: “We went from billing on trust and memory to billing on data. For an agency our size, that’s not a minor operational improvement. That’s a different business.”
One unexpected benefit: with real-time budget data at hand, account managers stopped avoiding scope conversations and started having them early. “We had a client who needed more revision rounds than their budget covered,” Chloe said. “We brought the Pulse data to a call three weeks before delivery, had an honest conversation, and got a scope change approved. No invoice surprises. That’s the real ROI.”