A UK civil and structural engineering consultancy, Crouch Waterfall, based south of London and in Bristol, has not only increased its billable hours since starting to use cloud-based TidyWork for workflow management, but also has hour by hour updates on the TidyWork dashboard showing whether each project is under or over budget.

Lee Kemp, Business Co-ordinator, explained the consultancy handles maintenance of bridges and other structures on the railways, rivers and canals all over Britain, a lot of the work being carried out at night.

“We used to have handwritten timesheets and pulled all that information into Excel files for each job” he said. “Not only did that introduce massive room for error, but there were lots of double entries and duplicated information. It would not be until the end of the project that we really knew whether we were working at a loss or keeping to budget”.

Crouch Waterfall now does its accounting in the cloud using Xero and it was the consultancy’s accountants who recommended TidyWork because it integrates so well with Xero and enables invoicing to be carried out directly from actual workflow and time records.

“We now have much more detailed records of the costs and margins of past jobs to call on when estimating” he said. “It helps us avoid repeating errors and to allow appropriately for overtime”.

Lee Kemp explained the biggest advantages for him are that TidyWork is so intuitive and is a major driver of growth. “Our people only needed a couple of hours training to be fully up and running” he said. “Our business is expanding and cloud software is playing a major part in enabling us to achieve that”.