How a NZ Plumbing Company Recovered $90,000 in Uninvoiced Work with AI Employees
11 inboxes unmanaged. $90k in completed jobs never billed. Claire for comms, Miles for billing—with custom Fergus and Slack wiring.
This client is a residential and commercial plumbing company operating across Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.
The jobs were getting done. The business side wasn't keeping up.
The problem
When you run a trade business across three cities, the admin surface area is bigger than most people expect.
Every job generates communication. Quotes go out, clients respond, suppliers send updates, staff ask questions. Across 11 separate inboxes spread throughout the business, that was piling up daily with no system for handling it. Important messages got buried next to spam. Follow-ups that needed to happen weren't happening because nobody had a clear view of what was sitting there.
The inbox problem
11 inboxes across the business, largely unmanaged. Anything important had an equal chance of being actioned, missed, or buried under noise.
The invoicing situation was a separate problem with a direct dollar figure attached.
Completed jobs were sitting in Fergus, their job management system, without invoices raised against them. The work had been done. The revenue had been earned. But because raising invoices and following up required someone to manually go through the system, check job status, draft the invoice, and chase the client, it kept getting pushed to later.
The result: approximately $90,000 in completed work that had never been billed.
The AI employees we deployed
Catalog roles + trade-specific wiring
Claire matches our executive assistant: inbox triage and follow-up across the business. Miles matches fractional CFO work: invoicing and collections. Connecting Fergus, Slack, and multi-city job rollups was custom configuration on that stack—not something you get out of the box without a discovery call.
Claire, executive assistant
Claire now manages all 11 inboxes. Every incoming message gets read, categorised, and actioned without a human opening it first.
Spam filtered automatically. Urgent messages flagged so the right person sees them. Routine enquiries drafted for quick review before sending. Follow-ups that had gone quiet get picked back up without anyone having to remember they were waiting.
What this changed day to day
The team stopped starting every morning wading through inboxes to figure out what needed attention. Claire surfaces what matters. Everything else is handled.
Miles, fractional CFO
Miles owns the billing side: what's been completed but not yet invoiced, draft invoices, and payment follow-up.
We wired him to Fergus and their invoicing stack so the founder gets a live view of uninvoiced work. That visibility alone was the unlock. Before, nobody had a clear picture of how much completed work was sitting there without an invoice. The number turned out to be $90,000.
With that surfaced, the founder works through outstanding invoices via Slack. Ask which jobs are uninvoiced, pull job details, draft the invoice, and send. What previously required manually cross-referencing Fergus against the invoicing system job by job became a conversation they could work through in an hour.
Daily rollups across Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch (active jobs, completed, overdue) run on the same stack as custom ops reporting. That is closer to what Noah does on other accounts—KPI and status commentary—not a default Miles install, but configured here so billing and visibility live in one place.
Revenue recovered
$90,000 in completed, uninvoiced work identified and billed once the founder had visibility. The work had been done for months. It just had never been invoiced.
The result
Same team. Same jobs. Same three cities. What changed was how much of the administrative overhead was running itself versus requiring someone's time.
The $90,000 recovery was immediate. But the ongoing value is the visibility that made it possible. Completed work no longer quietly accumulates unbilled.
The inbox situation changed the day-to-day for everyone. Instead of managing communication chaos across 11 accounts, the team deals with a filtered view of what actually needs them.
What changed operationally
Inbox triage across 11 accounts now runs automatically. Invoicing went from invisible backlog to an on-demand Slack conversation, with Miles handling job lookups, drafting, and sending on request.
The takeaway
Most trade businesses have this problem. The work is getting done. But the back end, the communication, the invoicing, the follow-up, is running on manual effort and falling through the cracks in proportion to how busy things get.
The $90,000 sitting uninvoiced wasn't an anomaly. It's what happens when a growing business has no easy way to see what's been done vs. what's been billed. The gap doesn't show up until someone finally looks.
If your business has outstanding invoices that haven't been followed up or inboxes nobody fully owns, get in touch and we'll show you what AI employees look like for your operation.