The challenge
A 16-person municipal water treatment and filtration company operating nationally ran its finances on QuickBooks Desktop heading into end-of-support and its projects across five to ten separate Planner files and spreadsheets. Leadership had no unified view of project cost, budget, or throughput.
The pain points
QuickBooks Desktop heading into end-of-support, with intermittent outages already
Business impact: The company risked losing its core financial system at the worst possible moment, with no project, logistics, or manufacturing capability to grow into.
Five to ten separate Planner files, Excel trackers, and paper folders with no unified visibility
Business impact: The operations director ran roughly a dozen active projects with no real-time view of task completion, often waiting two to three days to learn where work stood.
Chemistry product sales tracked entirely outside the financials in a standalone spreadsheet
Business impact: An entire revenue line never reconciled cleanly into the books.
How we solved it
- Implemented Dynamics 365 Business Central and Project Operations in a single combined go-live
- Built an eight-phase project template from the company's own lifecycle, with milestone, percentage-of-completion, and end-of-project billing
- Configured GL, AP, and AR with three-account bank reconciliation and CFO-plus-operations approval workflows
- Designed a role-based security model so field staff can run projects and invoice without seeing the financials
The impact
One platform replacing QuickBooks plus five to ten Planner files, ahead of the end-of-support deadline
Real-time budget-versus-actual visibility across every active project
Predictable fixed monthly cost and the clean segregation of duties the CFO required
Service line
Dynamics 365 Project Operations