Accounting for growth

Calvert engaged with an accounting consultant who wholeheartedly recommended Happen Business’s Jim2 package. By this time Dean Calvert was so desperate to get a replacement package that after checking that Jim2 could do most of what he needed it to, he took the plunge and signed up without looking at any of the competition.

Happen Business managing director, Paul Berger, describes Jim2 as a fully integrated, all-in-one system and most importantly for companies such as Calvert Technology, the service module is a fundamental component of the system. “Tracking of conversations is also an important factor,” said Berger. “If someone calls up, it’s tracked. Jim2 is also very workflow- and business process-oriented. Most people think it’s an accounting software package, which it is, but the workflow and business process becomes a very natural part of how you do business. It helps you instead of getting in the way.”

Calvert’s faith in the product’s capability has been rewarded, however, as his company saw virtually immediate benefits from the implementation. “Jim2 fixed the problem in terms of accounting processes almost immediately. For example, sending out statements used to take several hours. When we went to do it with Jim2, it took two minutes – that was
a very pleasant surprise.”

“It’s totally improved efficiency from the accounting side of things. We’re able to track product that’s on order, back order, update the status of ETAs with product sales and do serial number tracking. From the services perspective we can create a services job, assign different technicians and the information sharing which was totally absent when we were using Outlook is now available.”

Return on investment is a critical factor for any business and it’s even more so for small businesses with their very real capital constraints. “The productivity efficiencies gained from being able to do a two-hour job in two minutes and being able to capture much more information means the Jim2 implementation has paid for itself inside 12 months,” said Calvert. I don’t have a quantitative ROI but I reckon it’s less than 12 months and as an owner of a small business you kind of know when something’s working or not working.”

As well as reducing costs, Jim2 has also lead to a noticeable jump in customer satisfaction. Invoices are going out and on time and customers are able to get an update on the progress of a job far more easily than ever before. “If a customer is working with one technician on an issue and that technician is unavailable, another technician can see that information and talk to the customer about it,” Calvert said.

“As a result, there are no technicians saying ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know about that job, I’ll have to get someone to call you back.’ And our invoicing and financial closure process is working well, we’re building a routine around those sort of regular functions and the invoices look professional, they’re going out in a timely manner and there’s one invoice for multiple jobs. Our customers have been so impressed we’ve actually had feedback saying ‘you’ve got a new system, it looks good.’”

Jim2 worked straight out of the box for Calvert Technologies, but Dean Calvert admits he made it easy for himself by deciding to start with a clean slate instead of trying to import all the historical data. “With IT kit a particular server might sell for four months and then the model or part number changes, so I decided it didn’t make sense to input a whole lot of historical part numbers.”

For Calvert one of the biggest challenges with the implementation was the sheer capability of the software. “It had a steep learning curve. I developed a headache every day during the week of implementation because I was the Jim2’s internal evangelist and I had to know all the bits and pieces so I could keep getting the information and training out to the staff.”

Indeed, Calvert believes that although the company’s business is IT the decision to get in an implementer from Happen Business was the best decision he could have made. “Some people try to implement Jim themselves and my advice is don’t. Don’t try and do it yourself. Get an implementer in, get help from Happen Business. It’s a critical tool for the business, it’s not like a new version of Microsoft Office, and we just would not have been able to do it as well on our own.”

So is there anything that Calvert would do differently? “I would put it in earlier. We batted on with the old software and all the old processes for far too long.”

Workflow is a key component of Jim2’s capabilities, but Calvert said taking advantage of this functionality has been a gradual process. “We’ve been doing bits and pieces, but we certainly haven’t sucked the fat out of it. We use functions like the different statuses you can have in a job, handing jobs from one technician to another but there is still a lot more we can do with it.”

While Calvert Technologies is yet to scratch the surface of what Jim2 can do in some areas, in others it’s been instrumental in helping Happen Business improve the package. “I’ve given feedback to Happen about new features we want in there and they’ve actually put some of those features into subsequent updates of the product. Being able to say, ‘this what I want and this why I want it’ and have it happen is a great advantage that goes with being a local supplier.”

And Calvert Technologies also has big plans for expanding its use of Jim2. “We’re trying to get ourselves organised to put the web front end which will allow techs out in the field to update job records from a web browser or hand-held device. The next step will be having customers putting their own jobs in and we’re basically just going to expand on Jim’s core feature set. Out of the box it addresses about 90 percent and as the business grows and develops I’ll be getting the various modules into place until it gets to 100 percent.”