Hydroflux Doubles Revenue Without Growing Its Finance Team, with NetSuite + FullClarity
By: Rich Uphus | August 2, 2026
Introduction
The Hydroflux Group designs, builds and services water and wastewater treatment plants across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. From its Sydney headquarters, its engineers and project teams deliver design-and-construct projects for two very different markets: municipal utilities on one side, and industrial clients in food and beverage, mining and manufacturing on the other.
Projects are the heart of the business. They generate roughly 70% of Hydroflux’s revenue, and every one of them lives or dies on labor hours, margins and milestones.
Headquarters: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Industry: Water and wastewater treatment; design-and-construct projects
Environment: Eight entities, including separate municipal and industrial project businesses
“Our project department is our bread and butter. It’s 70% of our revenue. The time that we save having FullClarity in NetSuite is tremendous.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager, Hydroflux
At a Glance
- 2x revenue: Turnover grew from about AU$40 million to about AU$88 million on the same finance and project support headcount.
- 3 days to 1 hour: Project cost reporting and group consolidated financials that took two to three days now take an hour or two, with live project data refreshed in about 30 seconds.
- 8 to 9 hires avoided: Staying on spreadsheets would have forced an estimated three to four additional accounting hires plus about five more people to support the project team.
- 2x project manager capacity: Project managers went from handling about two projects each to four or five simultaneously.
- AU$11 million projects: Typical project values grew from AU$3 to 4 million, tracked live against quoted margins.
“It would take us at least two or three days to gather all the info and verify it, and then we’d forward it on to the project team. With twenty-something projects on hand per entity, you’ve got to do that twenty-something times.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager, Hydroflux
The Challenge
Hydroflux ran for years on accounting software built for smaller businesses. As the group grew to eight entities, three constraints tightened at once.
1. Consolidation was manual.
- The old platform had no consolidation reporting. Every group-level view, including the financial viability assessments that government clients require before awarding work, was assembled by hand across eight entities over two to three days.
2. Project reporting was a bottleneck.
- Project managers had no access to the accounting system, so they waited on the finance team to run, verify and forward cost reports for each of forty-plus live projects. Every project manager kept their own spreadsheet, and a division manager and support clerk spent days each month gathering and reconciling them for board reporting. The result: “everyone was working from different versions of the data.”
3. Margin leaked through labor hours.
- Revenue recognition, which Hydroflux runs project by project in its own way, lived in a manually run spreadsheet macro. And with no historical project data at hand, tenders routinely underquoted labor hours. A job quoted at 20 design hours could burn 60, and nobody saw it until the project closed.
“FullClarity was introduced to us at the time, and that was one of the reasons why we went with NetSuite. We knew we had to get something that could help us streamline our project department’s monthly chores, tasks and reporting.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager, Hydroflux
Why NetSuite + FullClarity
Hydroflux selected Oracle NetSuite for group consolidation and financial visibility across all eight entities. FullClarity, introduced during the evaluation, is one of the reasons NetSuite won the decision.
What sealed it was fit. Hydroflux’s processes are unusual by design, and the team refused to bend the business to fit its software.
“We knew FullClarity could give us the flexibility to customize to the processes and procedures we were already using. I could communicate my needs, and they listened.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager, Hydroflux
The Solution
Hydroflux went live in July 2023 after a year of scoping and change management, with FullClarity’s project workflows running inside NetSuite.
Revenue recognition at the press of a button.
- The manual spreadsheet macro became a script configured to Hydroflux’s project-by-project method. Impact: month-end checks that took three to four days now take an hour or two.
One platform, two different businesses.
- The municipal and industrial entities kept their different requirements but now report through a single consolidated view. Impact: group financials for government prequalification in an hour or two instead of days.
Labor forecasting built on their own history.
- Estimators now price design, drafting and project hours from actual results on comparable jobs, and put dollar amounts on contingencies they previously guessed at. Impact: tighter, more competitive tenders on the line item that “really gets us.”
Live dashboards for every role.
- Customized dashboards give project managers and leadership current data on project performance, resource use and margins without asking the finance team. One project that was starting to exceed budget was caught early, with corrective action taken “before it became a much bigger issue.”
“We didn’t have to hire anyone else, because it’s all in the system. Previously a project manager could probably only handle two projects on hand. Now a project manager can handle four or five simultaneously.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager, Hydroflux
“Previously we were more focused on verifying the data, not analyzing the data. Now that we can generate the data within 30 seconds, we’ve got time to analyze.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager
“Beyond the time savings, the biggest benefit has been confidence in our data. Everyone is working from the same information, which means decisions are made faster and with greater confidence.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager
“Our CEO runs reports every second day just to see how the projects are tracking, and the value in that is tremendous. For the past three or four years he hasn’t had to come to accounts for any data.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager
The Results
1. Revenue doubled on the same back office
- Impact: Since going live, Hydroflux has roughly doubled turnover, from about AU$40 million to about AU$88 million, while project values nearly tripled. The back office that supported AU$40 million supports AU$88 million today.
2. The finance team’s job changed shape
- Impact: Hydroflux puts the efficiency gain at more than 50%, and the hours moved from checking numbers to using them.
3. Project managers carry double the load
- Impact: Project managers went from handling about two projects each to four or five simultaneously, with drifting budgets flagged while there is still time to act.
4. The CEO serves himself
- Impact: The CEO’s reaction the first time a saved search was loaded onto his dashboard: “Oh my God, I can actually do this myself now.”
“If another company, particularly one already using NetSuite, asked for our recommendation, we’d have no hesitation in recommending FullClarity. It’s delivered real business value, and the support we’ve received from the team has been outstanding throughout the journey.”
- Julia Lin, Finance Manager, Hydroflux
Moving Forward
Three years in, Hydroflux keeps adding projects and taking on larger ones on the same platform, and its finance team now takes reference calls from other companies evaluating FullClarity.
Running project-based businesses inside NetSuite is what FullClarity does. See it in action: book a walkthrough.
