Situation
DROP Collaborative is a St. Louis-based engineering consulting firm that helps communities and industries navigate the complex, compliance-heavy world of wastewater treatment. The company pairs deep technical expertise with proprietary software to help municipalities and industrial clients modernize their pretreatment programs — work that demands precise tracking of deliverables, regulatory timelines, and client commitments.
DROP Collaborative was scaling fast — adding clients, expanding services, and deepening their impact across the communities tackling wastewater compliance. Growth exposed the gap between the business and its systems. Project status lived in people's heads. Billing was manual and time-consuming. Workload visibility across the team was limited.
DROP Collaborative needed a structured project management system that could keep pace with a growing book of business.
Jira configuration goals
The company needed a way to do all of the following:
- Track projects and associated deliverables in a centralized, accessible way
- Manage team workloads with clear visibility across active engagements
- Capture all employee time (billable client work as well as internal items like PTO, continuing education, and meetings) and connect it directly to invoice generation and QuickBooks
Implementation required configuring the system to fit DROP Collaborative's workflows and earn team adoption, neither of which a generic rollout would achieve.
Custom Jira configurations
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Sketch Development was engaged to implement Jira as DROP Collaborative's core project management platform, paired with two Atlassian Marketplace apps chosen to close the specific operational gaps the team had identified.
Jira timesheets app
The Timesheets by Tempo Jira app gave the team a straightforward way to log time against work items in Jira, whether billable client work or internal activities like meetings, PTO, and continuing education. Finance gained full visibility into logged hours, making it possible to verify that all time was accounted for before any invoice was generated.
Jira invoice integration
Clerk Invoices by Hello Clerk completed the pipeline. By pulling logged time directly from Tempo, Clerk Invoices generates invoices automatically with just the right amount of (configured) detail and syncs them to QuickBooks, eliminating manual data entry between systems entirely. Sketch also configured Clerk Invoices to produce client-ready chargeback reports, giving DROP Collaborative's clients the documentation they need to recover eligible costs from their own customers.
Turnkey Jira consulting
The engagement covered licensing, Jira setup, Tempo and Hello Clerk configuration, workflow integration across all three tools, and staff training. Sketch's Atlassian consultants identified and resolved edge cases and process gaps as they surfaced.
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