Overheard in the office ....
“There has to be a better way to do this”
Thought the frustrated employee who holds their head in their hands after manually transcribing five hundred job records into an excel file so that they can be sent of to finance for invoices to be sent out.
“Where’s the job profit and loss report for last month, I need it for tomorrow’s board meeting”
Asks the new commercial director? The employee sinks in their chair, knowing the answer is not going to be pleasing.
“Well the file has only just been sent over to finance, it’ll take them two to three days to process it and get the invoices out to the clients, we are not likely to get the management information we need back for at least a week. Then I’ll be able to produce the job profit and loss report in excel and you’ll have it in about two weeks”
The new commercial director sighs, “so it’s going to take me a further two weeks to see if any of the jobs we did last month were profitable? Why can’t we just press a button and get all this information”
“Well lets see, the guys on the road fill all their job sheets in on paper and put them in Fred’s tray when they come in the office, some of them only come in once a month. Fred empties it once a week and gives to it Juile who marks off on the calendar that the jobs been done. Juile keeps the job sheet until the job report is completed and a copy sent to the client. The job sheets are then passed to me to check against the quote and add them into the master jobs spreadsheet and then send the finished ones to Ben in finance to raise the invoice to the client. The whole process takes weeks to move through the business and even then out of the 543 jobs we did last month, I’ve only got 489 job sheets!” said the employee.
"So from actually doing the job, how long on average does it take us to send an invoice"
"On average about 6 weeks, Then we give our customers 60 days credit when they get the invoice"
"Okay so what your saying is it takes on average 102 days from starting a job to getting paid and we're losing records for 10% of the jobs - has nobody ever addressed this?"
"Well sort of, we've got a proposal from a highly recommended software house who did some work for the business Charlie's girlfriend works for. They designed and developed a software application which runs their whole business, jobs are completed by the guys using an app on a tablet in realtime and invoices can be sent the same day, management information is avaliable immediatley and they mapped the whole thing to what the business needed. She said its revolutionised the business"
"Forgot the report, get me a copy of that proposal"
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