AT A GLANCE
- Industry: Franchise Marketing Agency
- Primary Challenge: Fully manual monthly billing reconciliation across hundreds of franchise store locations
- Tools: Cassidy · Zapier · QuickBooks · ClickUp · Google Drive
- Key Result: What once required an entire team to coordinate manually now runs as an automated workflow, with humans in the loop where it matters.
RocketBarn Marketing is a franchise marketing agency managing advertising budgets and campaigns for multi-location brands. Their enterprise clients operate hundreds of individual franchise store locations, each with its own paid media budget, running inside Google Ads. Every dollar allocated to every store has to be tracked, billed accurately to the client, and handed off to the campaign team so they can apply it in the platform.
At that scale, the monthly billing cycle is a coordination challenge that touches Finance, Operations, and the campaign team simultaneously.
The leadership at RocketBarn Marketing had already invested in building internal AI literacy across the team. They weren't starting from zero. What they needed was an implementation partner who could take that foundation and apply it to their most time-consuming operational bottleneck: monthly enterprise billing and paid media budget planning.
When Billing Coordination Becomes a Monthly Bottleneck
Every month, each client sent over a budget file listing every franchise store location and its paid media budget for the coming month. For an agency managing hundreds of stores across multiple brands, that single file had to produce two things simultaneously:
- A client invoice: reflecting what each store spends and the fee for the coming month, processed through QuickBooks
- A monthly paid media spend plan: assigning the exact budget allocated to every store, delivered to account managers via ClickUp, so that they can apply the changes in Google Ads
Getting from that raw budget file to those two outputs required several team members, multiple manual steps, and significant coordination every single billing cycle. The operations team consolidated spreadsheet tabs by hand, standardized data formats, and ran a store-by-store comparison against the prior month to identify every budget change: increases, decreases, new store additions, and removals.
Then came the downstream work. Finance manually translated those changes into client invoices inside QuickBooks, batched by store groups. At this volume, hundreds of store changes per month, the system slowed to a crawl and froze. Simultaneously, ClickUp tasks were created by hand for each account manager, populated with the exact paid media budget assigned to every store they managed, so they knew precisely how much to spend per location in Google Ads that month.
Automating Client Invoicing and Monthly Paid Media Planning with AI
RocketBarn partnered with SoftSnow to build the AI automated workflow that handles the full billing and paid media planning cycle from a single file upload.
Triggered when the monthly budget file lands in a shared Google Drive folder, the agent starts. Each brand is processed individually, a deliberate architectural choice that improves accuracy when handling large, multi-tab input files. The agent consolidates all tabs into a single unified sheet, standardizes store data automatically, then pulls the prior month's budget from Google Drive and runs a store-by-store comparison, labeling every change: increase, decrease, addition, or removal.
Only stores with actual paid media budget changes move downstream. Unchanged stores are filtered out entirely, their invoices continue as-is, and their Google Ads campaigns keep running at the same budget with no action needed.
For changed stores, the agent separates the management fee from the total paid media budget automatically, then creates clean, structured output files in Google Drive at every step, giving the team a full audit trail before anything reaches the downstream systems.
From there, Zapier routes the processed data in two directions simultaneously:
→ QuickBooks receives batched invoice updates for Finance: structured, normalized inputs that replace manual line-item entry and eliminate the high-volume manual updates.
→ ClickUp receives a new task for every store with a budget change: populated with the store's new paid media budget. Account managers open ClickUp and immediately know exactly how much to spend per store.
The result: the team begins each billing cycle with invoices already updated and spend plans already assigned.
Faster Invoicing and Smarter Spend Plans, Without the Manual Work
What once required an entire team to coordinate manually now runs as an automated workflow, with humans in the loop where it matters.
- QuickBooks friction eliminated
Batched, structured inputs replace manual entry; the system load and freezing issues that came with high-volume manual updates are gone.
- Spend plans delivered automatically
Account managers start every month with their paid media budgets already assigned in ClickUp, ready to execute in Google Ads.
- Zero data preparation errors
Store data is standardized and validated automatically before it reaches any downstream system.
- An architecture built to scale
When a new client with similar store complexity joins the roster, the same workflow structure is adapted, without rebuilding the model from scratch.
"The entire team at SoftSnow was incredibly open to hearing the process. Asking the right questions and getting the team to really open up about what the pain points were was great. Immediately being able to solve something in the moment on a call... helped us learn going forward as we want to build out things on our own. Seeing it in real time was fantastic." — Janessa Retzer, RocketBarn Marketing
How Franchise Marketing Agencies Can Automate Billing and Media Planning
Media budget and billing for multi-store clients is one of the most consistent operational drains in agency life, and one of the most automatable. When the inputs are structured (a budget file) and the outputs are predictable (invoices and media spend plans), the manual steps in between are exactly what AI agents are built to absorb.
The agencies that move fastest are the ones that redirect their team's energy away from repetitive coordination and toward the paid media strategy work that actually drives client results.
Ready to reclaim your team's strategic hours? Let's talk.
