Text-to-Invoice and Automated Billing

• Hours worked on client projects went unlogged unless the owner stopped to fill in a tracker, which rarely happened mid-day
• Invoicing meant reconstructing the month from calendars and memory, then hand-building each invoice
• Retainer invoices had to be remembered, created, and sent on the first of every month, by hand

A chat-based billing pipeline. The owner sends one plain-English Telegram message from their phone the moment work ends: "Spent 3 hours on the contact form." AI parses the client, hours, and description, matches the client record, logs the entry, and replies with that client's running unbilled total and an invoice-now button.

• Time capture takes the same effort as texting a friend, so it actually happens
• One tap turns unbilled hours into a draft invoice in QuickBooks Online, each entry as its own line at that client's rate
• On the first of each month, every retainer client's invoice drafts itself: the retainer billed in advance, plus any unbilled hours from the month before, on one invoice
• Overdue invoices surface automatically in Telegram as a weekly nudge
• Nothing is ever sent automatically; every invoice is a draft until a human reviews and sends it from QuickBooks Online

A Telegram bot feeding an automation layer, an AI parsing step with deterministic client matching, a Postgres system of record, and a two-way QuickBooks Online integration running against production books. Idempotent by design: re-running a billing cycle cannot double-bill a client.

• Time is logged at the moment it happens, from a phone, in one sentence
• Monthly invoicing dropped from an assembly job to a review-and-send click
• Retainer billing runs itself on the first of the month, with ad hoc hours included on the same invoice
• Every invoice still passes through human review before a client sees it