Accounting for growth

Starting a small business is tough. Anyone who takes the plunge often gets started by putting their assets on the line and ends up working like crazy to make things work. Many businesses start off being run on Excel spreadsheets which track income and expenditure, do quotes and invoices, but there comes a point where the business has expanded to the point it needs a piece of software essential to any company – an accounting package. The entry-level accounting software market is dominated by two major players – MYOB and Quicken – with a gaggle of smaller players such as MoneyWorks, BizWizz and Attache competing for the leftovers.

But what happens when a company grows beyond the capabilities of its existing accounting software? Quite often it can lead to organised chaos and a massive degradation of productivity, at the very least in the accounts department and often across the entire organisation. This was certainly the case prior to Calvert Technologies’ implementation of Happen Business’s Jim2 process-driven accounting software and eBusiness suite.

Calvert Technologies is an Adelaide-based systems integrator specialising in networking infrastructure for small businesses. The company was set up by Dean Calvert in May 1996 and in 12 years has grown to employ seven people, with plans to expand to 11 by the end of 2008, and an annual turnover of $1.7 million. Like many small businesses, Calvert Technologies started off with one of the two major accounting packages, but two years ago found the business’s growth had completely outstripped the software’s capabilities.

“From an accounting perspective, we were hitting the limits of what the existing software could do for our business – particularly when it came to tying in with the sales side of the business,” said Dean Calvert. “We didn’t have a way of tracking stock properly so we’d order product in and couldn’t tie it back to where we sold it to the client. As a result, we found that stock we didn’t know about was going out to customers and it wasn’t always being invoiced properly, or at all. If we had to track something that had been sold to a customer, we couldn’t tie it back to the original supplier’s invoice.”

Putting it another way, there was no continuity or workflow throughout Calvert Technologies’ whole sales and supply process. And the situation was equally bad for the service side of business. “We were using Outlook calendars to run our service team,” said Calvert. “When any service work was done, we’d take the details out of the Outlook calendar and turn it into an invoice in the existing accounting package, a process that was very time consuming and very messy.

“If technicians were sharing a job or just going back and forth to the client site, there was no place where all that job information was held together. The accounting, the sales and supply and the servicing side of the business had all outgrown our accounting software and as we were getting bigger and busier with more jobs, and more complex jobs, going on it became a real nightmare.”

accounting for growth software