Automated Invoicing to Xero

Billing From Memory

Dawbuts is an agricultural parasitology laboratory in Camden, NSW. GEN11’s John Pashley has worked with them since they were just starting out — sixteen years ago — building and growing WormTracker, the system that manages their CRM and test results.

For the past few years a bookkeeper had handled invoicing: take the completed test reports, sort them by client, and send invoices according to each client’s preferences. Those preferences were the catch. They weren’t written down anywhere — they lived in the team’s heads, built up over sixteen years of relationships:

• Some invoices go to the end client; some to a rural retailer that sells the test kits
• Some tests sit under a project arrangement with a larger corporation
• Some clients won’t pay without a purchase order — and the PO request often goes to a different contact than the person who pays

The invoicing run took roughly a day and a half every week. Then the bookkeeper announced they were leaving, and all of that hard-won billing knowledge was about to walk out with them. Matt got in touch with a simple question: could WormTracker create the invoice in Xero once a test report is completed?

The Solution

We started by meeting with the team to understand how the manual process actually worked — especially the edge cases. The “well, this client is different because…” rules that make real-world billing messy. The goal wasn’t to automate the easy 80%; it was to build a flexible billing system that could accommodate undocumented business logic they were already running. We then delivered it over a few months in stages — pay-as-you-go, with each stage useful in its own right — so the team could keep working throughout and see value before committing to the next step:

1. Getting the two systems in sync — before any invoice could be created automatically, WormTracker and Xero had to agree on three things: contacts, billable items (test types), and pricing. We built an interface in WormTracker to search the contacts already in Xero and link each FileMaker client to the right one, or create a new Xero contact with a click. We did the same for billing items, with UI to match each test type to its corresponding Xero product.
2. Billing preferences set as data, not code — rather than hard-coding each client’s rules, we made them options the team can set at the level that fits the arrangement: client, company, store, or corporation. The preferences live in the system as data, so the team can adjust them as arrangements change and set up each new client with their own from the start, without coming back to us.
3. Automated invoice creation — A new Invoice Run Sheet screen was built that allows the team to review the period’s completed tests, confirm each is allocated correctly, and create a single bulk invoice per client. Data entry is automatic. Tests that are incomplete or missing data show as not ready to invoice, so they can’t be billed by mistake or quietly forgotten.

The invoice run sheet does more than save time — it gives the team certainty that nothing has slipped through the cracks. The keep-a-human-in-the-loop verification step is deliberate: it surfaces any remaining edge cases, which we resolve through iteration, so every billing run both gets done faster and makes the system more automated. For Dawbuts, that confidence — knowing every completed test is accounted for and every invoice is right before it goes out — matters as much as the hours saved.

The result: a job that once took a day and a half every week now takes a few minutes a day, with fewer billing errors and far less double handling.

Beyond Invoicing

This project wasn’t really about invoicing — and it wasn’t really about FileMaker or Xero either. Those were just the tools Dawbuts already used. The real work was taking knowledge that existed only in people’s heads — accumulated over sixteen years of real relationships — and turning it into reliable system logic the business can depend on, regardless of who’s in the office that week.

Whatever systems you run, GEN11 designs custom software for organisations where critical knowledge lives in people’s heads, manual processes are a recurring time sink, and off-the-shelf tools can’t capture the real rules of the business. If your business is held together by someone’s routine and a lot of remembering, we can help you build something that actually fits how you operate.

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