Case studies · Zeroth

Engineering consultancy · Defence and asset-intensive

Timesheets and invoicing, moved into Microsoft 365 and Xero

Asset Management Associates are reliability, ILS and RAM engineers, a small senior team whose billable hours are the product. Timesheets lived in Harvest, a separate subscription with a separate login that most people opened on Friday afternoon. Every invoice meant typing the same hours again in Xero, and nothing linked an hour to the invoice that billed it.

AMA now runs on a Business OS built on the Microsoft 365 and Xero they already had.

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The system

Time logged against real projects, in the same place as mail, calendar and documents. Harvest retired
Approved hours draft straight into a Xero invoice, and those hours are marked billed in the same step
Hours on an invoice raised directly in Xero can be marked billed against it, so the next run does not bill them again
Email attachments read and saved into each person's own folder in the business's SharePoint library, with a note of where each came from
Pay runs drafted from the same approved hours, set up so the hours on a payslip come only from approved timesheets
Set up so that an invoice, a pay run or any email carrying a file is held for a person to release

Results

One subscription gone, and with it the step where hours were typed twice
Recorded hours reach a drafted invoice in one reviewed step, and the same hours set the pay run
Every action against their accounting system is on a log nobody can edit, including Zeroth
Built from AMA's own list: each item they raised is now available to the next business that needs it
No new software on any engineer's machine

The Business OS we built for Asset Management Associates · 1 min 43 s · captions on screen

Management consulting · Federal government

AI-native from the first week

Every process a business runs on gets invented once, by hand, usually by the founder who can least spare the hour. 41 South Consulting is a Canberra-based consulting business specialising in P3M and change management, serving government clients. Founded in 2025, and in its first months when we built this.

That is unusual. Most businesses come to us with years of established habits: processes invented under pressure, known only to two people, and expensive to change. A business this new has none of that yet, and none of the processes either.

So the OS went in before the headcount did.

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The system

The full OS from day one. Five role groups configured and ready before there were five people to hold them
Time, projects, clients, invoicing and the document store in one system, before they could become five subscriptions accumulated over three years
Running on their own Microsoft 365 and Teams, with accounting connected through the gateway
Client prospecting and recruitment prospecting built as workflows on top, because for a business this size those two activities are the growth plan
Their business context captured in their own documents: how they write, how they work, who they serve. The system writes in their voice

Results

Live in their own Microsoft tenant inside a week of the build starting. Signed in, with email, calendar and Xero connected
The business's operating processes exist as a system before the second hire. Nothing important is known only to the founder
Adding a person means provisioning an account. There is no fortnight of shadowing, because the role is already configured with the business's context
Prospecting for clients and for people runs on the same platform as delivery, so nothing has to be joined up later
Growth doesn't mean re-platforming. Automations get added one at a time, as the work justifies them

Real estate · Property management

Finding the revenue lost with ended managements

One agency's year of lost managements came to ~$1.1M in rent-roll value and commission. Managements end quarter after quarter: a landlord sells, an owner moves back in, or a competitor takes the file. Working out where each property went means looking up every address by hand, so the losses rarely get added up.

We built a quarterly automation that does the looking up.

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The system

Ingests the agency's list of ended managements, in whatever layout it exports
Resolves each property on realestate.com.au and classifies the outcome: sold, re-leased by another agency, or returned to the owner
Attributes each loss to the competitor now holding the file, and applies the agency's own fee and commission rates
Delivers a branded quarterly report: losses by manager, financial impact, competitor attribution, quarter-on-quarter trend

Results

A pilot run classified 167 ended managements with no manual lookups
Surfaced ~$1.1M in rent-roll value and commission across one agency's year of lost managements
Every dollar figure derives from the agency's own rates. The automation estimates nothing

Lead generation

Outreach drafted by the system, approved by a human

Prospecting properly means reading each profile, judging fit against your criteria, and writing an email that sounds like you. Hundreds of times. Generic mail-merge gets ignored, and doing it by hand takes too long at volume. The usual answer is to automate the sending without review, and that damages a business's reputation.

So we automated the drafting, and a person still approves every send.

Discuss a build like this

The system

Reads the target agent profiles from realestate.com.au and evaluates each against the user's own criteria, written in plain English
Drafts an individual email per qualified agent, in the user's voice and style
Set up to pause here: the drafts arrive by email, and they send when the user replies with a yes
Reply "approve, but make it shorter" and it redrafts before sending. Every step is recorded in an audit trail

Results

One approval reply per batch replaces hours of reading and writing
Zero emails sent without an explicit human yes, because the build was set up to wait for one
While it waits for approval, it costs nothing to run

Systems we have built, and what changed

Four case studies

Timesheets and invoicing, moved into Microsoft 365 and Xero

The system

Results

AI-native from the first week

The system

Results

Finding the revenue lost with ended managements

The system

Results

Outreach drafted by the system, approved by a human

The system

Results

Getting in touch