Case study: how a London interior design firm cut its month end from 10 days to half a day

A London interior design firm replaced slow project-software reporting and a manual Xero-and-Excel month end with a live, AI-assisted work-in-progress platform.

What was the problem?

The firm ran its projects in its project management software, but the reporting didn't give them the figures they needed. Work-in-progress couldn't be reported reliably and the reports that did exist were slow.

Every month end meant exporting data and working it up by hand between Xero and Excel. It took five to ten working days, mistakes were common, and figures had to be traced back manually for audit.

What did we build?

• A direct API connection: to the project software, so project, invoice and purchase-order data flows in automatically, with no exports and no re-keying.
• A live work-in-progress platform: for the accounts team and a client dashboard, hosted in the firm's own Microsoft SharePoint, so everyone works in the same place.
• Automatic Xero journals: created by the platform at month end, checked by an accountant and uploaded straight into Xero. Excel is no longer part of the process, every journal is visible, and figures can be frozen for month end and refreshed as data changes.
• A dedicated Claude AI agent: embedded in the platform, so staff can ask questions about any project in everyday language and get answers from that project's own data.
• Automatic alerts: that report when data is missing or when someone changes the original baseline, so issues surface straight away rather than at month end.

What changed?

Management reporting moved off the project software entirely and onto Oswald Murdock's API-driven reports: cleaner, more reliable and easy to update.

Month-end WIP went from five to ten working days of manual processing to about half a day of checking by a bookkeeper against the internal projects, and around an hour to reflect the figures in the accounts. The work is now checking, not processing.

One source of truth: the accounts team, project managers and directors all see the same live figures.

“Using AI, Oswald Murdock gave us live profitability on every project, comparing what we're spending with the revenue coming in.” (Director, London interior design firm)

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Client details are shared with permission. Where a client has asked not to be named, identifying details have been removed.