Self-Hosted ERP: Integrated Operations & R&D Compliance

A professional services firm was locked into a patchwork of disconnected third-party tools: timesheets in one system, payroll in another, project accounting in a third. The result was double entry, billing delays, payroll mismatches, and a year-end scramble to manually reconstruct SRED (Scientific Research & Experimental Development) tax-credit claims. Employees avoided the legacy timesheet interface, so data was always late and often wrong. The firm had no real-time view of project profitability and no audit trail for government incentive reviews.

Deployed a fully self-hosted ERP to break the SaaS dependency and unify under one roof. Built a custom visual timesheet module that fed directly into HR management, payroll, project accounting, and invoicing: one entry, multiple downstream systems. Locked submissions weekly to create an immutable audit trail. Tied every hour to a billed project or a SRED-eligible project with automatic cost allocation. Integrated the general ledger so management reporting and compliance documentation came from the same source.

Weekly compliance became a one-click operation. Payroll, billing, and government tax-credit claims all flowed from a single, validated dataset. Management gained real-time visibility into project profitability and R&D eligibility. The firm eliminated per-seat SaaS fees, owned its data end-to-end, and stopped relying on external vendors for critical business logic.