Sage Coretime gives visibility and control of staff time and ensures effective project deliverability.
The Client
Child Graddon Lewis is a busy Architects practice located in London’s Spitalfields. They work across all sectors and have a variety of public sector and private clients including high street retailers, schools, hotel developers, social housing providers and private developers. They work collaboratively with clients and the design team through constructive dialogue.
Current clients include Genesis Housing Association, Notting Hill Housing Association, CityWest and a number of private developers, whilst retail clients include high street brands such as Nike, Boots, Hobbs and Vision Express.
Given their obvious success, it is hard to imagine too many ‘pain points’ in their business, but as is often the case, along with success come a number of different management challenges. With projects ranging in length from 2 weeks to 2 years and of varying complexity, staff numbers varying over time, and clients increasingly looking for evidence of time spent on their projects, they realised that they needed a better way to manage employee timesheets.
The Problem
Mark Jeffery, Associate Director at the practice explains, “We need to be flexible and be able to allocate resources as and when they are needed. Effectively we needed better visibility of time on our projects in order to do that. The existing Excel based timesheets were not routinely completed by our staff and they lacked any real facility to approve time and keep track of costs incurred.
It was also difficult to show clients on a time-charged basis, the time we were spending on their projects. In the end we felt that there were occasions when we weren’t always charging the full value of the project for the amount of work undertaken, simply because we weren’t able to track time and costs consistently and accurately.”
The Solution
Mark continues, “We invited three software suppliers to present their systems, but we ended up choosing Coretime because the system was so easy to use. We could see straightaway that we would be able to record time and expenses much more accurately against projects, and users would be able to see how profitable their projects were.”
“As a business we see our flexibility to move from job to job as a strength, and our ability to respond to changing customer requirements is equally as important as adding value to those projects through great design. With something like 95% of all our business being repeat business, we need to ensure we are keeping our clients satisfied by being able to deliver projects on budget and on time. However, as a business we also need to ensure that we are able to quickly forecast project costs, be consistent with similar past projects. Then once the project has started we need to be able to track time and expenses to ensure we are delivering projects at a fair cost which also allows us to remain competitive in the marketplace.”
Timesheet, expense and billing software improving accuracy
When asked about how they are using the system, Mark explains, “We do mainly use Sage Coretime to keep track of people’s time and expenses, but the individual project leaders use Coretime to see where they are against agreed fees and to assess profitability on their individual projects. We use the system to generate invoices at the end of the month and it allows us to look back at project costs and see how well it reflects fees. We can then use project history for the next similar project to improve our fee bids.
Previously, we had more of a rough ‘finger in the air’ approach to costing based on past experience, but now we can be a lot more accurate about what a project is going to cost and clients can see that. It’s rare for a client to actually ask for timesheet or expense evidence, but we can now provide the data if they wish and justify project time in discussions with them. Most of the time, I think just knowing that that’s the way we do things now we have Coretime, does give them increased confidence that the fees we are charging reflect our time and costs accurately. ”
Sage Coretime used to evaluate profitability and improve costings
Sage Coretime can be used to help companies identify their most and least profitable projects and help guide decision-making. Mark continues to explain how they use the system to help improve profitability, “We don’t tend to use the system to help us decide which projects are better for us to take on, simply because we don’t just take on projects purely on the basis of whether we think they will be profitable or not.
However, although we tend to use Coretime principally as a time tracking tool, it is still of great value to us because can now we can clearly see where individual project gains and losses are. The bigger picture is that we value our repeat business and accept that in the long run, gains and losses on projects do even out. What it has done is to help us to be more focussed. Tracking time and expenses in Coretime has helped us to improve our accuracy in fee bids, and being able to more accurately forecast project costs which then contributes indirectly to the bottom-line.”
Flexible and scalable system to meet changing requirements
When asked about how their system requirements have changed over time, Mark adds, “We went for Coretime as it was simple to use and we could use it straight ‘out of the box’. We didn’t feel the need for any modifications, and we could just set our projects up as we wanted. We currently have about 35 users but over time the number of users has changed, so the system is pretty flexible and scalable. In fact, we have easily been able to add or remove users as our business requirements have changed.”
Training and support
Talking about future plans for using Sage Coretime, Mark explains, “Support has always been very good. We had some initial training of the directors which we were very happy with. But recently we had some refresher training to review how we were using the system and update us on how the system has changed so we could look at other aspects of the system which we might want to consider using. Although we do tend to use it mainly as a time tracking tool and to generate invoices at the end of the month, we do see that strength of the system is that you can use as much, or as little, of the functionality as you want. For example, as yet we have chosen not to integrate it with our Sage 50 accounts but that is still an option for the future if we decide to go that way.”
The Outcome
Summing up, “The aspect that really sold the system to us was the ease with which users could enter their timesheets because getting people to actually fill out their timesheets was the critical thing. In terms of the upfront investment costs, we could easily see a concrete return on our investment, because our staff time is our biggest cost and Sage Coretime gives us complete visibility and traceability of time. It helps us to allocate our resources effectively and manage our projects more efficiently.”
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