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User Stories is a regular column on the WorkflowMax blog. Here, we get a company to walk us through their experience implementing and using WorkflowMax. Every company is different, and every firm has different methods and processes for managing their projects. Our hope is that by taking a look at what others do, it may help you gain an understanding of how WorkflowMax could work for you.
Today we talk to Colin Anderson, Managing Director of Effectus Ltd, a New Zealand-based IT consulting firm.
Tell us about your business, Effectus Ltd:
We are an IT consulting firm, so we’re primarily selling our time. We have 17 staff currently, but we have quite a few contractors at any one time. At the moment, we’ve probably got ten contractors at different levels of part-time and full-time. We opened our first office in Christchurch in 2007, and we’ve grown to have offices in Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland.
What was the process of choosing job management software like for you?
It was bloody painful - you can quote me on that! Because we have multiple offices, having a product in the cloud was essential. Being an IT consulting company, we drew up a formal set of requirements of what we wanted and compared that to several vendors. We defined how we wanted our business to run and what we wanted the software to do, and it was quite challenging to find software that worked at that level.
We knew we would struggle to find the perfect fit, but WorkflowMax was the closest for us.
You’re a business that has consultants who record their time. What was the process of timesheeting like before WorkflowMax and how has it improved?
It was terrible! It was a manual process. There were spreadsheets all over the place that had to be consolidated. Getting it all together and ensuring it was all ready, then double checking everything, was a time consuming process.
The practical side of getting the timesheets in, and ensuring that the consultants have actually put all their time in the right jobs, has greatly improved. It would be fair to say that we’re now saving 10 minutes a day per consultant.
And what about invoicing?
Our invoicing is now more consistent, more reliable, and we produce better quality invoices. For our end of month billing process, office manager Viv churns out our invoicing within half a day, so WorkflowMax has saved us at least a day. By the second morning of the month, our invoices are out the door, which is two days earlier than they used to be.
Do you think that also has an impact on your business cashflow?
Absolutely it does. We have a lot of corporate clients, and if we don’t get our invoices in by a certain day of the month, they just miss the billing run, and too bad, we have to wait. We hardly ever miss that now, so we have a very good debtors ledger as a result of it.
Why would you recommend WorkflowMax to other IT service providers?
It’s a good functional fit for IT professional services. It’s not hard to use, it’s robust, we don’t have data quality issues. We don’t have any concerns about its integrity, which you get in some systems. It just does the job.
Thanks Colin! If you’re running a company using WorkflowMax and want to talk workflow with us, then drop me an email steff.green@xero.com so we can feature your business here.
