O’Neill Mechanical & Electrical Services Ltd use LiveCosts to:

What are the main benefits of using LiveCosts for your business?

• The most beneficial aspect of LiveCosts has to be the cost and reports for each project and the live profit margins. They’re being shown right there on the home page once you log in so it’s easy and clear to see all the real-time information with the reports just being pulled up within minutes and because we were processing our supplier invoices a month after they were issued there was always that delay of information for the cost inside of things whereas now with LiveCosts everything is processed on a daily basis so there’s no more delay and all the information is in real time which is really good. And secondly, the tracking of purchase orders is so beneficial since it shows us exactly what has been delivered and when and our foremen can mark off the deliveries on their mobile app and it’s on our screens instantly. Also, the delivery docket then can be uploaded by taking a picture so there’s full transparency with it. Major bonus is my desk is finally nice and tidy with no paperwork lying around.

The most beneficial feature LiveCosts offered to you?

• And for me it’s definitely the processing of the invoices it’s so much smoother now since I just drop the invoices over to the LiveCosts inbox and the system then automatically reads the information for me so I just have to quickly scan my eye over the details and approve them and then the system will flag up any mismatches of price or like a non-delivery and then at the end of each month I can just upload a batch of invoices over to our Sage accounting system with the click of a button like it’s so handy. Another great feature would be the labour tracking feature. Our foremen can upload all employee hours daily or weekly using the mobile app and you can set permissions for each user on the app so that you can decide what each user has access of viewing so privacy of information as well is maintained there. And the mobile app’s really simple and straightforward to use also which is great for our foremen out on site.

How much time has LiveCosts saved your company?

• Since we were doing everything manually like from writing out a purchase order, emailing it over, waiting on delivery dockets to come in and then matching up all the supplier invoices with the purchase orders to make sure everything was charged correctly and it was such a labour intensive exercise with like multiple people involved from start to finish. Whereas now with the LiveCosts the information’s all there like a few clicks of the mouse and it takes two or three people to complete it.

What is the most measurable benefit?

• Definitely, the accurate and the real-time information for our monthly valuations has been a game changer for us. There’s no guesstimating anymore and we can submit accurate valuations each month helping our cash flow immensely like since we can predict every month what’s coming in because we know the valuations are correct and also I’d say the customer catalogue has been brilliant since we have up-to-date customer prices and don’t have to double check to make sure that we’re not being overcharged for materials and it just makes producing the purchase orders so much easier as well since the information it’s all there already. You just have to pull it across into the purchase order so really handy.

Share your experience of integrating LiveCosts with sage 50.

• Once you set up your profile on LiveCosts and put in all the cost codes and your tax codes and make sure that the supplier codes all match what’s in Sage already once you do that it’s pretty much a simple few clicks to transfer all the data over and I would just filter my invoices for that particular month and export them to an excel spreadsheet then import that data onto Sage and then you can bookmark all the invoices on LiveCosts so that you know what’s been sent and what hasn’t been sent it’s really really cool feature.