Streamlining R&D Timesheet Management for Grant Advisory Teams with AI and Automation

Client Overview
The client is an Australian firm specialising in grant advisory services. Their consultants support businesses in accessing R&D and innovation funding, guiding clients through complex compliance requirements while delivering tailored, high-quality advice.

The Challenge
The client’s consultants spent significant time manually reviewing call transcripts to extract R&D activity details for timesheet records. This involved reading raw text, identifying project overviews, objectives, employee activities, and entering this data into structured Google Sheets.

This manual process was error-prone, repetitive, and constrained the team’s ability to focus on higher-value advisory work. Left unchecked, it risked slowing delivery times and limiting the firm’s ability to scale its services efficiently.

The Solution
Sync Stream developed an AI-powered, automated Timesheet Management system, securely hosted on the client’s server. The solution uses AI to process call transcripts, automatically extract and structure key R&D project and employee activity details, and populate them into Google Sheets with project-specific tabs.

Key features include:

• AI-powered extraction of project overviews, objectives, and employee activities from call transcripts.
• Automated creation and naming of project-specific sheets in Google Sheets.
• Structured, repeatable workflows reducing manual data entry.
• Secure, self-hosted infrastructure ensuring data privacy and auditability.

This automation significantly reduces human error, frees consultants to focus on high-value client work, and sets up a scalable system for ongoing timesheet management.

Results
Ongoing benefits include:

• Dramatic reduction in manual data entry and transcript parsing time.
• Improved accuracy and consistency in R&D reporting.
• Greater consultant capacity for client-facing advisory work.
• A repeatable, scalable foundation for managing ongoing compliance data.