Letting 70 people raise invoices without losing control

One Event has more than 70 staff working across over 10 countries in travel, accommodation and event management. Invoicing ran on a combination of Google Sheets, Excel and Word documents.

That arrangement works until it does not scale. Raising an invoice meant knowing which template to copy, where the numbering sequence had got to, which deal it belonged to and where the finished document should be saved. Anyone could learn it, but few had, so invoicing concentrated into a small number of people who became the route through which all billing passed.

The obvious fix is to let everyone raise invoices. The reason nobody does that is the risk. Distributing invoicing across 70 people without controls means inconsistent numbering, duplicated documents, invoices detached from the deals they belong to, and a finance team reconstructing what happened after the fact.

So the requirement was both things at once: any team member can raise an invoice, and accounting and management keep full control of the numbers.

How we approached it

The build ran through five stages: analyzing how invoicing actually worked in practice, designing the workflow, building the system, migrating existing data, and training the team with documentation they could return to.

The analysis stage did more work than it sounds like. Documented processes and real processes differ, and the exceptions people have quietly built up are usually the reason a system gets rejected after launch.

What was built

The system runs on monday.com, connected to Dropbox, with five Make.com scenarios handling the parts that cross between systems:

• When a deal's status changes to confirmed, its invoice group is created automatically
• Invoice items link themselves to the relevant deal and company on creation
• A unique document number is generated before the PDF is produced, keeping numbering sequential and unrepeated
• Finished PDFs upload to Dropbox, with outdated versions removed so there is one current document
• When a deal reaches invoiced and closed, all its invoice items close with it

Each scenario removes a decision that previously depended on someone remembering. Numbering is not something a person allocates. Filing is not a step anyone can skip. The link between an invoice and its deal is created rather than maintained.

That is what makes distribution safe. The controls are in the system, so they do not depend on who is raising the invoice.

The result

Any team member can now raise an invoice independently, while accounting and management retain oversight of numbering, documents and the connection between billing and deals.

The system revolutionized our operations, allowing every team member to independently raise invoices while ensuring accounting and management retain full control.

The build took one month.