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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 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. The company needed a way to:
Implementation required configuring the system to fit DROP Collaborative's workflows and earn team adoption, neither of which a generic rollout would achieve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Less than two months after go-live, DROP Collaborative had measurable operational improvements across billing, project visibility, and internal communication.
Connecting Tempo time logs to Hello Clerk's invoice generation and QuickBooks sync eliminated the manual steps that had been slowing the billing cycle. Kim Cole, Principal at DROP Collaborative, projects further gains as the team deepens their use of the platform.
The team also gained shared visibility into project status that hadn't existed before. Everyone, from project leads to finance, now works from the same system.
We hope these are the kinds of outcomes you were looking for. If you want to learn more about the work that went into this project, we're happy to answer your questions.
Better yet, let's discuss the customized Jira automations you were considering before you came here to learn more. We love to talk shop, and the first few conversations are always free.
