How Quantity Surveyors at Logic Group used LiveCosts to streamline their work:

My name is Eoin McLaughlin and I’m a quantity surveyor. I work for Logic Group and we’re based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Logic Group is a group of companies and we primarily cover project management. We have cost consultancies – that’s our quantity surveyors. We have facilities managers and in the last couple of years we’ve been driving Logic Projects, which is our construction wing.

Before LiveCosts, as quantity surveyors working primarily as consultants to construction companies, we’d often be asked after an estimate to carry through the contract admin of the project.

From experience on our own projects in Logic Group, and working for these guys, we became used to using spreadsheets for managing how we were spending against the budgets that we actually estimated.

Around the time that I found LiveCosts I was working on a project in Christchurch – an $11 million apartment building, on which we were using this spreadsheet.

I’ve looked back on that and that was averaging, at its height, about 200 invoices a month.

That would take two days for me as a quantity surveyor to input all of those invoices into the spreadsheet.

Unfortunately that didn’t actually have any assistance to the accounts team. They would simply drop the invoices as they received them into a folder.

I would check over them, check the rates, enter them into the spreadsheet, offer a report at the end of the month for budgeting, and then the accounts person would start the process over again, from entering them into Xero.

So what LiveCosts did to help with that scenario was that, moving forward into our future projects, we were able to just automate that process.

Now that we actually have that system in place for a current project we
have in Christchurch with Logic Group, we’ve issued out a project or purchase order for each and every subcontractor. And we also have them out for the suppliers as we go.

Having that ability to then receive invoices and automatically reconcile them against the purchase orders, and process through for payment, I’d say we think that will be saving us about 70-80% of time.