Unity Case Study

Global CRE leader doubles in size and needs a contract platform built for scale.

Learn how Colliers used Unity to streamline their contract management process, reduce administrative burden, and scale with their growing business.

Executive Summary

As Colliers rapidly expanded, its contract management systems buckled under the strain of dealing with manual workflows, scattered tools, and rising admin costs. The team needed a flexible, scalable solution that could automate key workflows without forcing them to conform to rigid software constraints. By implementing StackDC’s Unity, Colliers freed up over 7,000 hours for more valuable work annually, improved cash flow with automated collections, and unlocked $1.2 million in productive capacity savings, positioning the company to scale efficiently and adapt to future growth.

The Problem

Manual Chaos to Autonomous Collections

  • AR staff for Colliers Canadian appraisals business relied upon a manual process of pulling aging reports, hunting down 60-day+ invoices, and crafting individual reminder emails. 
  • Credit-card payments required ad-hoc links, resulting in only $3 M being processed online last year. 
  • Customers missing invoices or asking for Statements of Account triggered another manual scramble for the department. 
  • Some 30 % of receivables sat >90 days, capital Colliers could not reinvest into growing operations. 

“We were constantly throwing employee hours at the problem, hiring a
bigger administrative team, which both was costly and carried significant
risk. We had pushed as far as we could with the idea of outsourcing to
make up for productive capacity.”

Scott Bowden (Head of Valuations & Advisory Services)

Productive capacity Savings
>$ 0 M

The implementation of StackDC Unity has already created significant financial benefits
for Colliers. The streamlined contract management and integrated solutions have led
to a $1.2M in production capacity savings.

Results 

  • 33-day DSO reduction(aligns with benchmarked automation gains), freeing ≈ $0.9 M in working capital per $10 M receivables base, worth $70 k+ a year in avoided interest. 
  • Collector capacity up 3×and manual follow-up time down 70 %, repurposing staff to dispute resolution and customer success. 
  • Avoided write-offs: by triggering dunning at day 30 instead of day 60, Colliers keeps invoices in the 90 % collectable zone instead of watching odds fall to 50 %+ 
  • Lower OPEX: every invoice reminder that flows automatically avoids ~$7 in internal processing cost vs. paper-bound workflows. 
  • Higher share of online payments: Integrated Stripe processing has already doubled last-year’s volume of online payment processing within six months of launching, resulting in faster and more seamless collections and cash accounting steps compared to traditional patchwork of check, ACH and bank transfers.  

Why It Matters

55 % of U.S. invoices already arrive late, and each late payment forces SMBs to burn ~14 hours per week on manual follow-ups, throttling growth. Collectability is 90 % inside 60 days but plummets to 50 % after 90 days and 20 % past 180 days—every extra day is real money at risk. Firms that fully automate AR typically cut DSO ~30 %, returning millions to the balance-sheet and trimming head-count costs by a third. Unity’s automated dunning engine drops those benefits straight into Colliers’ P&L. 

Efficiency Gains

Automating workflows and invoicing through Unity saved Colliers over 7,000 hours annually, equating to over $1.12 million in productive capacity.

Scalability

Unity provided the flexibility to scale Colliers’ operations without adding significant administrative costs or risks.

What’s Next

  • Colliers is now expanding Unity’s dunning processing to legacy receivables 1-2 years old to recapture long-stalled cash. 
  • Bottom-line: Unity converted AR from a labor-intensive afterthought into a proactive cash-flow engine, paying for itself in months and compounding returns every billing cycle. 

StackDC delivers an AI-first, no-code workflow-automation platform plus vertically focused modules that remove manual data work for real-estate and other ops-heavy enterprises.