Case Study
Flow-Right: Joblogic Payroll Automation for a Lean Engineering Business
How Joblogic payroll automation helped a building services contractor stop manually processing timesheets — and get accurate, automated pay runs from the system they already had.
Sector: Building Services | Engagement: Joblogic payroll automation | Result: Manual timesheet processing eliminated for 40 engineers
“I knew there had to be a better way and David was exactly the right person to help us find it. He knows the system inside out and just gets the job done.”
Chris Eland, CEO, Flow-Right
The Client
Flow-Right is a building services contractor with around 40 engineers operating across the UK. The business runs on Joblogic — a field service management platform — but the data inside it wasn’t being used. Payroll was manual, bonus calculations were complex, and there was no data infrastructure behind the system to support either.
The Situation
Flow-Right came to us with a specific problem: processing timesheets and calculating engineer bonuses was taking hours. Every pay period, someone was manually working through each engineer’s details, cutting and pasting records into a spreadsheet. With almost 40 staff, that process was not sustainable.
Joblogic held the data. The business just couldn’t get it out in a usable form.
The Constraint
Flow-Right had no existing data infrastructure and a small internal team. Budget ruled out enterprise tooling. The bonus structure added further complexity: different rules applied to different engineer types, job categories, and income allocations. None of that logic was formally documented.
Earlier scoping work with another supplier hadn’t moved to delivery. The business needed someone who could assess the situation quickly, make the right technical call, and deliver.
Building Joblogic payroll automation on a proper data layer
The first decision was architectural. Rather than connecting Power BI directly to raw Joblogic data — a common but fragile approach — we built a proper data layer first. Google BigQuery was the pragmatic choice: no existing platform to work around, low cost, and fit for purpose.
One commercial detail mattered here. Joblogic charges separately for API access — a recurring cost that adds up fast for a lean business. Instead, we used Joblogic’s built-in scheduled report delivery to push data out automatically at no extra licence cost. The extracts land in cloud storage, get processed into a structured layer in BigQuery, and feed payroll from there. Same outcome, no API fees, and an architecture that makes business logic maintainable rather than patched into each report.
Before any calculation logic was built, we worked closely with the business to document the bonus rules accurately. That documentation process mattered: without agreed, written rules, automation would only have locked in ambiguity.
Power BI was then used for output — and as a diagnostic tool. Surfacing data quality issues before they reached payroll calculations meant the business could clean records at source in Joblogic, rather than discover errors after the fact.
What Changed
For a lean engineering business, the difference is operational rather than technical. Payroll is no longer a manual bottleneck that consumes hours every pay run.
For a business of this size, that matters. The time saved on administration is time returned to the business. Accurate, consistent bonus calculations remove a recurring source of friction between the business and its engineers.
It is the same pattern we later applied at Linaker, where Joblogic payroll automation built on a clean data foundation freed two full-time positions in the accounts team.
Results
- Manual timesheet processing eliminated — payroll runs no longer depend on cut-and-paste data collection
- Bonus calculations automated and based on fully documented, agreed business rules
- Data quality issues surfaced before they reach payroll — errors caught at source in Joblogic
- Scalable data architecture built from the ground up on Google BigQuery — ready to extend as the business grows
“We’ve been using Joblogic software for several years now and we were not making the most of the data contained within it. I came across David when I was looking for experts in the software and the work he has done to help us automate our payroll has helped us save hours of time.”
Chris Eland, CEO, Flow-Right
Still processing timesheets by hand?
If your business runs on field service management software — Joblogic, BigChange, simPRO, or Commusoft — and your team is still processing timesheets manually, we can help. Find out more about the Warehouse QuickStart or our Data Platform Build to talk through what’s possible.