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Rock Kitchen Harris:
the endless pursuit of efficiency

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10 Min Read

At Rock Kitchen Harris (RKH) you’ll find creative, friendly people dedicated to producing ideas that work damn hard for their clients, rather successfully too. Industry players for over 35 years now, RKH know more than most that businesses are only as good as today’s best work. Adopting WorkflowMax and Xero into their agency, RKH ensures they are on top of their game and provide more value to clients than ever before.

RKH is a full-service creative agency based in Leicester in the UK. With a friendly and dedicated team, they address the needs of their clients and help them through the application of advertising, design, public relations, media planning and web design. 

Each unit at RKH has its own specialists who work independently or collectively to provide fully integrated marketing solutions. “It’s a varied place,” says Ian Moore, one of the five associate directors at RKH.

“There are big projects going on for national companies and there's work going on for small shops around the corner as well. So, whilst we are a Leicester based agency, we cover business all across the UK. We work with lots of different people.”

This approach to marketing services means RKH has seen incredible success over the past 35 odd years they have been in business, and they aren’t planning on going anywhere anytime soon. You see, RKH subscribe to the philosophy that creative agencies are only as good as what they achieve today and conduct themselves as such. And with their track record, it clearly works.

Integral to building their success has been a dedicated focus on offering second-to-none service and value for their clients. You need time to offer RKH's level of service but you can’t simply go make more of it. So what's the  answer? Finding efficiencies.

The RKH team knows that the valuable time needed on some aspects of work can often be made up elsewhere. This is where WorkflowMax shines.

The move to WorkflowMax and Xero means that account managers know a job is finished so they can bill it out straight away. It has really, really helped with our cash flow situation."

Ian Moore, Rock Kitchen Harris

 

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Six years ago, RKH's job management process was less than ideal. Unnecessary printouts, job bags being misplaced, poor visibility on deadlines and resource capacity led to bottlenecks and a highly manual processes.

It’s a challenge a lot of agencies are familiar with.

“The old accounts system was very, very paper-based. There were a lot of print outs, people filling in data from handwritten notes. It worked, but it was incredibly inefficient,” says Ian.

With a lot of clients across the board, this issue was only amplified. Deciding enough was enough, the team at RKH started to look at their options.

“We knew we had an old system and started looking at the alternatives. Xero and WorkflowMax offered us something a lot more suitable to our needs,” says Ian.

Xero and WorkflowMax are central to how the business runs now."

Ian Moore, Rock Kitchen Harris
“Constantly striving for efficiency to deliver better work. It’s making use of products like WorkflowMax, Xero and Trello that will enable us to do that.”

Always looking for ways to aid creativity, create more value for their clients and ultimately work more efficiently, Rock Kitchen Harris were early adopters of cloud technology like WorkflowMax and Xero. 

 WorkflowMax lets the team manage workflow from quote through to invoice while tracking time and costs. It was this all-in-one integrated cloud-based solution to managing projects and jobs that really stood out for RKH, but it was integration that sold it for them.

Because WorkflowMax is owned by Xero, it integrates really well with Xero. With the ability to push sales invoices, get payment confirmation, send purchase orders and view net profitability, WorkflowMax offered everything RKH needed to maximise their business performance. And it helped their bottom line too.

Thanks to the two applications, every hour of every day can be accounted for, designers can track their time easily, and account managers know exactly when a job is finished so they can bill it out straight away. 

 

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This integration also means that when information is entered into one system it will pop through to the other automatically. This allowed RKH to eliminate unnecessary admin work on data entry, a far cry from their previous paper-based system.

But the integration didn’t stop there for RKH. Pockets of the business were also using Trello to manage projects in their teams. “As we were working on other projects, we came across Trello,” says Ian. “We saw that a lot of the structure of Trello could be applied to the job system we had. Realising that there was an API in both systems, it would be really, really easy to make sure that key data from WorkflowMax and Xero could be sent through to Trello. That integration through the API has helped us tie together our systems and stop unnecessary time being spent on replication.”

Relevant information can be sent from WorkflowMax through to Trello and automatically populate a card. In essence, the cards act as digital ‘job bags’ and display information for the team in a highly useful, visual format.

“Now, jobs opened appear in department job boards with key detail copied over from WorkflowMax,” says Ian.


The ability to build efficiencies in their quoting and estimating systems, manage jobs and timesheets, all while easily nurturing happy clients right from the first interaction has proven invaluable to RKH. They now have more time than ever to focus their energy on other high-value tasks that make big business impacts.

The integration has stopped unnecessary time being spent on copying and pasting, enabled a streamlined workflow for the business, but most importantly, allows Rock Kitchen Harris to spend more time connecting offline and being human. 

No credit card required. No contracts to cancel. No setup fees. No hidden costs. No downloads.

But this is not the end for RKH and WorkflowMax. In a sense, it is just the start. 

“In the future, we are going to be very much carrying on as we have,” says Ian. “Constantly striving for efficiency to deliver better work. It’s making use of products like WorkflowMax, Xero and Trello that will enable us to do that.” 

 

MAX hacks from Rock Kitchen Harris

If you, like RKH, are looking to improve efficiency and profitability within your own business, we have some helpful advice to get you on your way.

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Get integrated with Xero

With Xero and WorkflowMax you have everything you need to maximise your business performance. Enter information into one system and it pops through on the other automatically.

Reasons you’ll love the Xero integration:
  • Save time on data entry. Data moves between Xero and WorkflowMax with a single click. Eliminate unnecessary admin work and spend your time on more important tasks.
  • Easily push invoices to Xero. When you create a sales invoice in WorkflowMax, you can push that data through to Xero.
  • Send purchase orders and receipt supplier invoices in WorkflowMax in just a few clicks.
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Build efficiencies with your quoting and estimating

Estimating and quoting projects can be very time-consuming. And costly, if quotes are calculated incorrectly. While we all make mistakes from time to time, ideally we should have processes to ensure that we never make the same mistake twice.

Reasons you’ll love WorkflowMax quoting:
  • Create quotes in just a few clicks. With quickly generated estimates, you can respond to queries fast and capture more prospects!
  • Save time with quote templates. Use templates for common job types, enabling repeatability and accuracy. The faster you send a quote through, the faster it gets approved and you can get to work!
  • Seamless flow of information. Client information populates through from leads or jobs, saving you time and ensuring there is no double entry.
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Time-tracking saves time

When it comes to your company's output, time is the most crucial factor. You can always raise your rates, find more backers, and take on more clients, but you still only have 24 hours in every day. You need to ensure those hours are optimised for maximum benefit.

Reasons you’ll love WorkflowMax time tracking:
  • Say goodbye to spreadsheets. Staff can complete their own timesheets online, leaving you free to get on with your own tasks.
  • Record on the go. You no longer have to remember the details of all the jobs you worked on that day. Simply log time as you go.
  • Keep tabs on the business. Understand your productivity with accurate snapshots of time spent on projects, see who has been working on each job and how long it has taken them.
See 7 ways you could be unintentionally wasting time each day here.

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