Perth Plumbing Group
Achieves 90% Admin Reduction Across Multi-Business Operations

A rapidly expanding Perth plumbing group had grown from a small operation into a multi-entity franchise network approaching 300 stores — and the back-office infrastructure had never kept pace. Each business unit ran its own instance of field service software, maintained its own spreadsheets, and processed its own invoices independently. There was no single place to see what was happening across the group, which meant leadership was always working from partial information.

The financial reporting problem was particularly acute. Because data lived in separate SimPro environments and a patchwork of spreadsheets, the accounts team had to manually reconcile figures from multiple sources before any consolidated view was possible. Month-end reporting that should have taken hours stretched into days, and by the time numbers were ready, the window for meaningful decisions had often already closed.

Growth had also created a compounding admin burden. Staff across entities were processing the same supplier invoices independently — the same document being keyed in three or four times across different business units. With each new store added to the network, this duplication scaled directly with it. The organisation was effectively paying for full-time administrative headcount per entity just to maintain the status quo, with no realistic path to managing the next stage of growth without a structural change to how operations were run.

Rather than treating each business unit as a separate problem to solve independently, we designed a unified automation layer that sat across the entire group. The core challenge was creating consolidated visibility without forcing all entities onto a single system immediately — so the architecture was built to aggregate data from multiple sources whilst preserving the operational independence each entity needed.

SimPro was configured as a multi-entity job management hub, giving operations leadership a single dashboard across all business units — unified job status, cross-entity reporting, and workflow triggers that could span entities rather than being siloed within one. Microsoft Power Automate and SharePoint handled the document flow: invoices received by any entity were automatically routed through a shared processing pipeline, eliminating the duplicate keying that had been consuming admin hours across the group. We phased the rollout deliberately — invoice consolidation first to deliver immediate time savings, then unified financial reporting into Xero, then the staff and compliance management layer — so each phase demonstrated clear value before the next was introduced.

Technology Stack

• SimPro: Multi-entity job management hub with unified cross-entity visibility, consolidated reporting, and group-wide workflow automation
• Microsoft Power Automate: Cross-entity document routing, invoice approval chains, and automated escalation workflows
• SharePoint: Centralised document repository shared across all business units, replacing entity-by-entity file management
• Ezzy Bills: Automated invoice data extraction feeding directly into the consolidated processing pipeline
• Xero: Group-level financial management with consolidated reporting across all entities

The numbers tell part of the story. A 90% reduction in administrative processing time meant that work previously requiring a dedicated admin resource per entity was absorbed by the automated pipeline. The $24,000 in annual direct cost savings was real and measurable — but it understated the actual impact, because the more significant gain was structural: the business could now add new entities to the network without a corresponding increase in back-office headcount.

Before the project, scaling meant hiring. Each new business unit brought with it the overhead of another set of manual processes, another round of data entry, another reporting lag. After the automation layer was in place, that relationship was broken. The group achieved a 3x increase in operational capacity whilst the admin function stayed flat — and leadership gained something they had not had before: a real-time view across the entire organisation that was available on demand, not at the end of a multi-day reconciliation cycle.