Client Stories
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Ashgrove Mechanical use LiveCosts to:
Accounts save 1 day a week
Live reporting on any project's costs
Catch and record price changes instantly
About Ashgrove Mechanical
Ashgrove Mechanical Services is a mechanical company that deals with heating, plumbing, and ventilation in buildings.
They service all types of builds, including homes, commercial buildings, and hotels.
Visit www.ashgroveireland.ie
Challenges
What problem were you trying to solve?
- The problem is definitely the costing of the project – trying to track it.
- We do an application on the 26th of every month. So it meant that when I pulled a purchase report on the 26th, it meant that I didn’t obviously have all the invoices because we didn’t get the statements in at this stage, because they don’t come until until the end of the month, so I didn’t know if I was missing any.
- Then there’s obviously the ones then that would have been not in yet, because they might have been only sent out once a week or every two weeks.
- So that’s really what we were missing with the tracking.
What were you using before LiveCosts?
- So before we used to use maybe Excel, where you would kind of budget what you should be spending, and these are materials that you’re going to be buying on a kind of month to month basis.
- But it was never accurate enough to use as a report then for your application, because you could say that you needed ten such things.
- And it meant then that if the job wasn’t ready for them, it could push on the delay.
- Excel was the only one that we found that we could use – up until now.
Results
What are some of the main benefits of using LiveCosts?
- It’s brilliant that it’s live! You pull a report for whatever day you want, and it’s live.
- It tells you exactly how much you spent, exactly how much you’ve ordered, whether the invoice is in or not, that’s how much you have allocated to that job.
- Another big one for accounting side will be the stock ordering. So it meant that there’s actually you can take it out of stock and here it is still allocated to the job.
- Being able to pull a report on the cost of the project, you can see everything – literally. So you can see the materials, you can see the labour cost if you’ve allocated from stock, you can see it.
How much time does using LiveCosts save your business?
- Once it gets going, it definitely saves time. I’d say it could be up to nearly a day a week.
Like at the moment, I’m not finding out what job this invoice is to allocate it to, because you reconcile it straight away to the PO.
Another thing was the price increases.
You can see the price increases when you reconcile the invoice, so you can see whether it’s gone up or gone down, whereas otherwise you’d have to be going back looking at other invoices and no one has time for that.
You can see it, it’s just there once you reconcile the invoice to the PO, it tells you automatically – it changes colour to say whether it’s gone up it’s in red, or if it’s gone down, it’s in green.
Brilliant.
Advice
What would you say to other people considering LiveCosts?
- Give it time, because it definitely does work. It 100% works.
You can see exactly on a live basis what your company is costing between all your invoices coming in, you can see your labour, you can see if you take stuff out of stock, where it’s even gone, but 100% it works.
I would definitely recommend it.
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