HTA Architects swap spreadsheets for Workspace Project Accounting

HTA is a multidisciplinary design consultancy to the residential development and regeneration sectors. The practice is a leading housing design specialist, renowned for its focus on working with housing providers and communities to deliver great places.  

HTA employs over 100 staff operating from its London head office and an Edinburgh office and has over 40 years experience providing comprehensive design services on a wide variety of projects. 

Despite growing success, Simon Toplis, Associate Design Director explains some of the inefficiencies within the business’s administrative processes: “We were using Excel spreadsheets for monitoring project profitability and this brought with it a number of problems. The different disciplines within the business all use slightly different spreadsheets, so trying to align these against one project can get complicated. By the time everything has been compiled the information is often out of date and can be inaccurate. And then there’s the time that is spent on this process, this could be much better utilised on other things.” 

Already aware of Union Square’s Project Accounting solution, an email from the company titled ‘are you drowning in spreadsheets’, prompted HTA to take a closer look. Workspace Project Accounting tracks time, expenses and resource allocation in one central web-based system against the relevant contacts, projects and organisations. “We looked at some of the competitor products on the market but like that fact that Workspace is part of a wider solution, and that in the future we can also integrate our document management. The benefits were instantly apparent and we are now in the early stages of implementation” says Mr Toplis.

HTA will be rolling out timesheets, resourcing and financial reporting in the New Year and hope to incorporate document management at a later stage, for a fully integrated project management system. Workshops are scheduled for the start of January to inform staff of the changes that will be taking place. These workshops will communicate the key benefits namely; improved accuracy, improved availability of information and a decrease in time spent on administrative tasks.