Name: From Estimate to Invoice: AI-Powered Quote to Cash in Replicon
Uploaded: 2026-08-20T16:01:07.905Z
Duration: 21 min 28 s
Description: From Estimate to Invoice: AI-Powered Quote to Cash in Replicon

Transcript for "From Estimate to Invoice: AI-Powered Quote to Cash in Replicon": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, From Estimate to Invoice, AI Powered Quote to Cash in Replicon. Today, you'll see how Replicon's AI powered platform transforms the quote to cash process, eliminating the friction between your sales, delivery, and finance teams so you get paid faster with fewer errors and less leakage. I'm Jen Souza from Deltek. And before we get started, here are a few quick housekeeping notes to ensure you have the best webinar experience today. For the best viewing experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. Audio will stream through your computer, so make sure your volume is turned up. There is no dial in option. If you have a question, type it in the q and a box at the top right hand corner of your screen next to the dots tab. We'll address as many as possible at the end of the presentation, and any unanswered questions we'll follow-up with individually after the webinar. Resources, including today's presentation slides, are available in the document center at the top right hand corner of your screen. And you'll receive an email with the on demand recording within twenty four hours of the webinar ending. And now I would like to introduce you to today's speaker, Silhouette Yasin, manager, solutions engineering at Deltek. Silhouette, take it away. Thanks, Jenny. Yeah. No problem. First thing first, guys. You know, good to be here, and thank you for everyone who has joined us today. So today, we'll focus on one major gap, the distance between the revenue you earn and the revenue you actually keep. Now for most project based firms, that gap opens the moment a daily side. Right? From an estimated is basically, let's say, built on cut and stent, hours captured late or even not at all. Approval stuck in someone's invoice. Invoice is probably going up weeks behind. Like, there are multiple reasons. Every one of those is margin quietly leaking away. Now over the next fifteen minutes, I'll walk you through how Rakuten closes that loop. And end to end, it uses AI informed estimates, time captured automatically from the tools your teams may already be using, and validating those hours flowing, which are directly into, an invoice. Same work, more of it built and cached in the door faster. Now here's the agenda for today. We'll walk through the quote to cash gap, how you can estimate with confidence, and even capture every billable hour, ultimately accelerating cash flow and stopping leakage before it starts. We'll wrap up with q and a. So let's get started. The quote to cash gap. Right? Every deal you close starts a clock. And between that signature and the invoice, revenue quietly slips away. Margins are already thin. Firms are reporting around 21% profit operating profit, basically, on net revenue. So every leak matters. At the same time, revenue leakage from missed billable hours has jumped more than 60% year on year, and the median utilization across organizations is sitting at 40%. Now the root cause is usually the same. Sales, discovery, and even finance teams simply aren't talking to each other about time, the most important aspect, because that's the gap we are going to close today. Now estimating with confidence. Right? Now closing that gap starts before the project does. Margin is won or lost at the estimate level itself. Now Replicon uses your historical project data to inform those estimates proactively. So quotes go out faster and land closer to your reality. Now you also get cost visibility upfront, estimated versus actual side by side. You can course correct, while there's still margin for you to protect instead of finding that out later at the time of invoicing. And it works for how you actually sell, fixed bid, timing material, milestone dividend, or a combination of those without any custom base for each one of those. Now, obviously, all of this is important because you can't build what you don't capture. Zero time pulls every billable hour automatically from 100 plus digital applications your two teams might be using. Right? It could be online, offline, desktop, or even mobile. Validation rules catch errors before they become billing disputes later, and the system learns your team's patterns and gets sharper over time. Less chasing time sheets, nothing lost between delivery and the invoice. Now capture time is only valuable once it's cash. Right? Multi tier approvals keep billing moving instead of stalling in someone's inbox, and validated time flows straight into invoicing and out to your billing systems. The result is fewer disputes, shorter invoice cycles, and revenue you can recognize in real time, not weeks later. Now let's see all of this in action. So let me bring up my screen. Now this is the OverClickOn platform, right, that allows organizations to estimate all of that information that we'll be talking about. If you see, first of all, all of these projects that are probably in the planning stage itself as we are talking about estimating, either these projects can directly flow in from a third party system. Maybe these are probably, let's say, in your Salesforce or a CRM system, and probably at a probable stage, probably 50% or 70% where you think this project is something that we can win. Using integration, we can bring in all of that information directly to our platform. And, also, while we bring in, we can also populate all of that other necessary information that you may be requiring in terms of, resource cost, expenses, total hours, and all of that other information. And once you get that information in place, under resourcing or task let me just refresh the page. Seems like it's loading. As as soon as we get all of this information from, you know, any r it's an ERP system or your CRM system using APIs. It could be bidirectional APIs, webhooks. We can integrate with them so that all of that information seamlessly flows into our platform. And once they are in, it would move to this screen where we actually see all of those different projects that we have. Now in this respective screen itself is where we can go ahead and create those projects where we had initial estimates. For example, you can see if you click on this plus project, there are options where we can duplicate a project with all of that initial estimates. If you already had a project where you had computed, let's say, a project with x number of hours, including, this is the total billable amount, we can capture that information and prepopulate it into your new, projects that are actually created. For example, in this scenario, you can see financial data reporting is one such project. And the system, based on the number of rules you've assigned, the number of, hours you've assigned, what is an estimated cost that you initially estimate. Right? All of that information is captured and gives you an estimated billing for each of those months. So that way before a project even begins, we have an estimate and idea of what could be the revenue we could make out of those appropriate projects. And not only that, once this information is available in here, you can also see this is the estimation process where we're actually estimating. But once this entire thing is populated, once we identify the right resources based on different roles, different cost rates, and employees start working, this is where zero times capability comes in, right, where it is able to harvest time data from multiple digital applications that your teams may be using. So in this scenario, we can see the time has been harvested from a browser collector. Maybe your your your team members were probably working on on a browser on certain products or tasks. All of that information is captured with different browser collectors, desktop collectors, Google Outlook calendars, right, or any other desktop collectors as well. Here is a list of all the collectors that we have built. And, again, this is just a short list. We have multiple list of collectors, and we are continuously adding more and more connectors to this, exact list. Going back to this. Now as soon as all of this time data is captured using zero time, this data is then pushed into employees' time sheets. And based on that, that appropriate time data is pushed to downstream systems and also project managers or supervisors based on whoever the approvers are. And as soon as they approve, we, again, dispatch notifications letting the employees know that, you know, what all of your time sheets have been approved. That way we know what is the total time spent on all of those projects. At the same time, we are able to now map what was the initial, estimated billing versus what's the actual billing on that appropriate project. So that way, we can always compare what we initially estimated at day one before the project began. Are we actually meeting those initial estimates or not? Are we being profitable or not? These are good information. This is what we want to see to ensure our our actual billing is actually increasing than what we had initially estimated. And not only that, once if this is more like a project view. If you want to have a more focused view to kind of identify which products are kind of helping us identify what kind of revenue. But if you want to have a more overarching view of how much revenue we're making and all of that stuff, we can also provide you that by appropriate months. So that way we know as employees are capturing time, every billable hour that is captured is brought in directly in here so that we know for the month of May across all the projects, all different business units, this is the amount of revenue we were estimating, and this is what we actually built. And not only that, the moment any month, let's say, anyone forgets to put an invoice, probably the invoice was supposed to go out, the fifteenth of every month, and maybe the billing manager fell sick. In that scenario, the the invoice did not go go out in time. If that is the case, system can correctly identify that and tag those invoices to unbilled section. So that way you know these are all the different unbilled invoices that need to go out. This way, you're not missing out on any time that you have not billed, and this can be retroactively applied to future invoices as well based on how you like to go ahead and bill your clients. And this was only in terms of actual hours that employees are capturing, the billable hours that we're capturing using zero time across multiple digital applications. And even at the time of time capture, we are leveraging multiple validation rules as well to ensure the business rules are actually being met. For instance, if you want your saluted employees or contractors to work a minimum of forty hours a week and if they don't meet those critters that criteria, we can automatically flag those. If employees are exceeding their estimated hours in terms of those project or cost, we can proactively alert the project managers and supervisors, letting them know that you're you know, we are actually spending more time than what initially estimated on those projects and tasks. That way, we are not realizing this after the fact where the employees have actually entered time, but we know before itself that, yeah, the employees are actually indicating we have reached 70% of the estimate or 90% of the estimate system proactively gives you those alerts and notifications. And once all that data is here, as a finance leader, whenever you want to understand the health of the organization in terms of the projects we're managing, the system can give you real time API. So for you can see that this example for the month of July, this was our billable revenue and our actual estimated revenue as well. Because we always want to compare what was our initial estimate versus the actual billable revenue. Along with different revenue recognition policies, you know, we adhere to IFRS 15 guidelines, ASC six zero six accounting principles to ensure we are recognizing revenue the way the industry standard does, right, along with cost. And we can quickly identify that the month of July was not a very profitable for us. We actually incurred losses, whereas this was our initial estimate. And if you probably go, let's say, a month before, we can see for the month of June, we're actually profitable. This was the billable revenue, the recognized revenue, what was our estimate, what did we actually end up making. This this way, we get the real time visibility into what is happening in terms of finances within our organization. So helping you first create a project at the time of, you know, whenever the project is won or before even that when we are identifying what kind of resources need to be working on what type of projects, how many hours. So that way, we can capture that information beforehand. Windows projects, employees enter track time, approvals happen. And once that are approved, we understand and ensure all of those, revenue and the bill is not left unattended. All of those are actually captured directly within the platform. Let me go back to our slides and share the screen. Now you'll be wondering why Delta Replicon. Right? Now using Replicon, many films have been able to catch the same revenue gaps not before they're lost, not after. Now this is proven at scale across industries around the world. Here's our track record. Twenty five plus years of leadership solving complex time tracking challenges. We have over 500 large and enterprise customers across the globe, organizations that have the same complexity you are dealing with. More than half a million users rely on Replicon Time every day. AI driven alerts surface scope creep and billing gaps early using zero time before revenue is lost. Now we have built in dashboards that give leaders continuous visibility into project health and margins. Now the same early warning signs using AI driven alerts, full visibility using, you know, built in analytics, go and ready as we are federal and moderate. At the same time, global compliance covering 145 plus jurisdiction. This ensures that when the time is when when whenever organizers are struggling to capture all of that information, Replicon can bring that in one single place. This is what team I wanted to highlight from, the demo perspective. I will pass the call over to Jennifer. Jennifer, over to you. Great. Thank you so much for the insightful presentation, Silouac. We'll give everyone a minute to locate the q and a window on the right hand side of your console next to the docs tab. While you do so, I'd like to thank you for joining. And I hope that all of the attendees are walking away with a better understanding of how Replicon's AI powered platform transforms the quote to cash process. If you'd like to learn more about the quote to cash process or other Replicon modules, please select the learn to get paid quicker button on your screen or say yes in the pool pool and we will be in touch shortly. Alright, Silouac, we have a few questions from the audience, so we will jump into some of these. The. first one. that awesome. The first one that came in asks, our project managers already dislike filling out timesheets. I can see that as a common thing across the board. How was it not how is this not just another tool that they ignore? Yeah. I mean, fair. Right? An option is usually where these initiatives die. Now the difference here is zero time does most of the work automatically. It captures those activities from a 100 plus digital applications that teams might already be using. Could be Zoom, Jira, Slack, and so on and so forth. And then prepopulates that time sheet. The PMs drops shift from, you know, just fill this out from memory to actually review and confirm. And it gets smarter over time as it learns their patents. Less data entry basically tends to be the thing that actually moves our option, right, and not another mandate forced by the organization. Great. Well, along those lines, a lot of firms already have a PSA or ERP system in place, and our firm does specifically. Does this mean we have to rip that out and start over again? No. It's actually built to sit alongside what you have. Right? Not be not replace it. Like, there are 50 plus prebuilt connectors that we built into tools like Salesforce, QuickBooks online, ADP, Delta, Costpoint, and VantagePoint, SAP, and and many more. The actual problem most firms have isn't a missing system. It's that the systems they already have don't talk to each other about time. Replicon's job is to be that connecting layer. That's great to hear. I'm sure a lot of firms are happy because who wants to drop out a whole. year of peep them necessarily. With that, is the AI that we're using actually improving. estimates, or is it just automating it with an AI label on it? Legitimate question. Right? Given how loosely AI gets used right now. In this case, specific. ZeroTime uses your historical project data to inform estimates. So your team isn't starting from a blank page or gut instinct. It's not making the call for you. It's giving whoever's estimating a better informed starting point. They're on there in how similar projects actually performed in the past. So the judgment still stays with your team because as as things move, we know we have to adapt with changing environment. So it gives you a good estimate to start with. Great. We have a couple more questions that came in and then we'll be wrapping for the day. Our next question is, if we switch, what happens to our historical project data and anything currently in flight? Yeah. And this is a question that we get, all the time. So we have the ability to bring in historical project data if necessary, if your if the organization still wants to use them. However, what we have seen based on our experience is usually the in flight projects is what is usually brought into the projects, into our platform so that employers can start tracking their time. And And probably if they still want to bring in historical data, it's probably the last three months for reporting purposes. But we have the ability to mass import all of those information, during implementation. We can also use services to kind of bring all of that information using API. So we have multiple ways of bringing that in based on the use case, that they have. That's great to hear. And then our last question for the day, which seems like something everybody is itching to know is how long does implementation actually take? Yeah. That that's a loaded question. Right? I would say that that depends based on the complexity of the use case. An organization, that probably has medium complexity, all of the requirements can be simply met out of the box. Let's say there is, no custom integration per se. In those scenarios, we usually take eight to twelve weeks. It's a quick turnaround time. But if there is an organization that has multiple locations, there are some custom rules. We have noticed with larger enterprise customers. Sometimes there are integration with multiple systems involved, some rules that need to be configured. In those scenarios, yeah, we could add a few more weeks. But the standard out of the box integrate of standard of the box implementation usually takes, like, eight to twelve weeks to begin with. Great. Thank you so much, Silwath, and thank you for joining us today, everyone. Yep. Thank you. We hope everyone had a enjoyed the presentation as much as I did for one. But for more information about upcoming webinars and events, please visit deltech.com or complete the bur the brief survey that you'll see at the end of this session. If you have any questions, please reach out. And thank you, and have a wonderful day.