Extra services your team delivered. And never invoiced.
A scope change gets agreed on a call, the work gets done, and the approval never reaches billing. We build the step between your project system and your invoices that catches it, before the fee is gone.
Fixed price, quoted in writing once we've seen the handoff. Reply within one business day, no call.
Where it slips in an engineering or architecture firm
Scope change to invoice. The client asks for one more option, a PM says yes, someone does the work. Nobody logs it as additional services, so nobody bills it. Your engineers did the work for free, and they won't know until the project closes.
Proposal to project setup. The fee, the phases and the team get typed from the signed proposal into the project system, then again into accounting. Each retype is a place for the wrong phase code or a missing budget line, and an hour of a billable person's week.
Issue, revise, approve. A drawing set goes out before the reviewer signed off, or the wrong revision goes to the contractor. On a deadline, that's a resubmittal, rework, or a missed contractual date.
Joiners and leavers. A project engineer leaves and their logins to the file server, the project system and the client portal stay live. Nobody notices until somebody asks.
Example arithmetic, not a client result: one $1,500 extra service a month that never gets billed is $18,000 a year. Two a month is $36,000.
What changes
Every approved change has a record and an owner, and it shows up in billing without anyone having to remember it. Projects get set up once. Reviews happen before issue, not after. And when something stalls, a named person hears about it while there's still time to bill it, not at the end of the phase.
What we'd build first
One handoff, office side, with a person approving anything that matters. Usually one of these:
- An approval step between scope change and billing: the change request, who approved it, and the fee, carried into your project system and flagged to your billing lead if it isn't invoiced by the next cycle.
- Proposal to project setup, entered once and pushed to the systems that need it, with a check that the phases and budget match.
- A document-issue checklist that won't let a set go out without the named reviewer's sign-off, and keeps the record of who signed.
- Staff onboarding and offboarding across the systems your team uses, so access starts on day one and stops the day someone leaves.
What stays with your engineers: every engineering judgment and every professional sign-off. Software does the chasing and the record-keeping. People make the calls.
How it works
We time the handoff as it runs today and agree the acceptance test before anything is built. Then we check what your software already does. BQE CORE, Deltek, Monograph or Microsoft 365 may already have a feature that does this. When one of them fixes the problem, you'll hear that from us, even when it means there's no project. We build only what's missing, connect it to the project and accounting systems you already run, and route anything that fails to a named person. At handover you get the runbook, our access comes out, and you can switch it off yourself. Your manual process still works if you do.
How well two systems connect depends on each one's API and sign-in, so we check that before we quote, not after.
Built and run by us
We don't have engineering-firm case studies to show you yet. Here's what we've built and still run: onboarding and offboarding automation, an access review that checks Active Directory changes against Jira tickets so every access change has a ticket behind it, monthly restore tests through the Cohesity API, and Compass, a finance app at privatecompass.app. None of it is client work. All of it is the plumbing your handoff needs: approvals, records, and a trail of who changed what.
Credentials held at Chrysis: VMware VCP-DCV and VCTA, Cohesity Knowledge Expert, Sophos Certified Firewall Engineer, Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. Chrysis Networks is a Microsoft Partner and a Pax8 Partner.
What it costs
The Workflow Fix is $3,500 fixed for one handoff, about 10 business days once access and inputs are ready. A job that's clearly smaller or bigger gets a written quote between $3,000 and $4,500 before you commit. Software and licenses sit outside the price.
Fails the acceptance test we agree in writing? One free in-scope fix of up to 2 hours, then a retest. If it fails again, you choose 10% of the fee back as a partial refund or credit, up to $350.
Drowning in documents rather than approvals? Reviewed AI sorts one document type into a queue your people approve: $4,500 fixed, plus model usage and software fees.
Not sure what your project system can already do? The $350 walkthrough is up to five hours with written findings, credited in full if you go ahead.
Asked and answered
Can Chrysis connect BQE CORE, Deltek or Monograph to QuickBooks for an engineering firm?
Chrysis builds the handoff between a firm's project system and its accounting or Microsoft 365 tools, such as approved additional services carried into billing, after first checking what the native integration already covers. Whether a connection is possible depends on each product's API and sign-in method, which Chrysis checks before quoting. One handoff is the $3,500 Workflow Fix.
How do we stop doing additional services for free?
Additional services slip when the approval lives in an email or a call and never becomes a billable record. Chrysis builds one approval step that records the change, the approver and the fee, and flags anything approved but not invoiced to a named person before the next billing cycle.
Will automation make engineering decisions or sign off drawings?
No. Chrysis automates the chasing and record-keeping around engineering work, such as approvals, project setup and issue checklists, and every engineering judgment and professional sign-off stays with a licensed person at the firm.
We're a 12-person architecture practice. Is that too small?
Handoff volume or consequence matters more than headcount: the Workflow Fix fits when one handoff takes about two staff hours a week, or when one missed instance has cost more than the $3,500 fix. Below that, Chrysis usually recommends a native setting or a bounded hourly fix at $80 to $100 an hour.
Do we need Microsoft 365?
No. Chrysis builds inside Microsoft 365 when a firm runs it, and on n8n, Make or custom code when it doesn't.
Which approval keeps missing the invoice?
Tell us the handoff and the software it touches. Within one business day you'll get a written reply from the firm that would build it: whether it fits, what a fixed price would cover, and the first thing we'd check.