The building and construction division of D.H. Welton offers a high quality technical service backed by a wealth of experience in the building trade. It specialises in Alterations and Refurbishments to public buildings, commercial properties, schools, libraries, Industrial Units, Public House, Breweries and Restoration works to listed buildings, Plus Maintenance contracts to Local Authorities, National Supermarket chain and the third largest soft drinks manufacturer in the UK.
To accommodate the expanding business the division moved to new premises which prompted the need to review the accounting and management systems. The accounts used Sage Line 50 but all the operational costing information was kept on a range of complex and detailed spreadsheets and there was considerable scope to streamline the processes reduce data entry time.
After a brief investigation of the market Construction Manager was selected as the new system. Construction Manager is designed specifically for Sage Line 50 so would integrate directly with our existing accounts. The program included an additional module called Maintenance Manager which has been designed to manage and control high volume building maintenance works which is a key part of our business.
“The new system has been a massive time saver for us” says David Welton “and has cut down dramatically our data entry, especially on the maintenance jobs. Before we would be entering an invoice 3 times in different places. Now we enter it once. Wages and timesheets have been streamlined even more as we had to manually calculate mark ups for each labour entry to work out our sales invoices each month. We now build in a van rate into the timesheet costing which avoids another set of separate entries. Now this is all done automatically for us. The result is that we now enter once the purchase invoices and timesheets and the system automatically produces the sales invoices for each job.”
The overall effect has been to reduce 8 tasks into 3 and this is saving us over 30 hours of work each week.
There have been other benefits. The information from the system has enabled us to see more clearly where the costs of the business are and in particular recover the extra cost of overtime which has not always been picked up accurately in the past. This has resulted in adjustments to charge rates and an improvement in profitability.
"Overall we are very pleased with the system and the results we are now achieving. There were some initial teething problems but the support from JNC has been excellent and these have now been resolved."
