Client Stories
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South Coast Building Company use LiveCosts to:
See where costs were being attributed to a project
Have visibility in real time of where money is being spent
Reassure management of costings at agreed price
About South Coast Building Company
South Coast Building Company is a UK company based in Southampton, offering commercial and residential construction services as well as renewable energy services – all delivered with the highest standards of workmanship by skilled specialists.
Visit scbclimited.com
Challenges
What problem were you trying to solve?
- Problems with not having the most sophisticated financial controls in the first instance, not a great deal of discipline towards purchase orders, invoicing, and no level of control over simply live costs, real life budgeting and managing your costs on a project whilst it was running.
- We weren’t able to demonstrate to ourselves internally and potentially to other people exactly how much we were spending on particular areas of the business.
How were those problems affecting your business?
- Well, a great deal of management time was being spent sometimes in dispute with suppliers over what had been agreed and what had not been agreed. There was duplicate invoices appearing. Our suppliers are not as sophisticated as they could be in making sure that they are applying the costs that we had been agreed.
- If we have 20 or 30 projects on the go, and goodness knows how many invoices, some of them with 30 different line entries & 150 different products. How do you check all of that against the price you’ve agreed for your supplier? How do we know what was being delivered, where and when it was received, etc. And also applying those costs to individual areas of the projects. So that was the challenge we had.
What reservations did you have?
- Worried that the software becomes quite a big part of your business and you find out it doesn’t quite work as well as it could do and then you’ve got to backtrack out of your business and that’s always quite disruptive.
Results
What are some of the main benefits of using LiveCosts?
- The ability to create the purchase orders means that at a purchase order stage, you could see where the costs were being attributed to a project.
- Being able to process delivery notes and invoices into the back office or a management accounting system via LiveCosts. Which means that we only had to touch the invoices once and on the way through they were reconciling with the catalogue lists that we had from our suppliers. So it was achieving quite a lot in an automated fashion.
- The Scanner reads the content of the invoices, is one of the best that I’ve seen so far because you use them for all sorts of different applications. The management accounting system, for example, they’ve always had a certain amount of manual intervention but the one that LiveCosts has got is probably the best I’ve seen.
Which LiveCosts feature is most beneficial in your business day to day?
- It’s very difficult to be specific about one because they’re all equally as good. It just helps the business, the flow through of the documentation into the management accounts and gives us visibility in real time of where we’re spending our money and also gives us reassurance that we are only spending what we should be spending at the right price.
How much time does using LifeCosts save your business?
- There’s a lot less time with the management team arguing amongst themselves and with suppliers about what was agreed and what wasn’t agreed, because it’s all very transparent at the front end now.
- And we could increase our business probably threefold this year. I think it’s fair to say without LiveCosts, we’d probably have to beef up our finance team by another two or three people. So there is significant savings without a doubt. And of course, we’re not losing money, as much money as we were before.
What measurable benefit have you seen?
- The through input of the paperwork, the automation, which means that we have to employ less people to achieve our objective.
Integrating LiveCosts with Xero?
- It’s very straightforward, really. Push a button and you’re talking to Xero. The invoices go into Xero via LiveCosts and the receipts or the invoices probably from the suppliers, automatically go against the project. So, what I have then, in LiveCosts, are the costs associated with the project and the income, which is all integrated through Xero. It happens automatically. Seamless.
Advice
What would you say to other people considering using LiveCosts?
- Well, if you’re in the construction industry and you want to get some serious control around your spend and put some efficiency in the financial side of your business, then I’d purchase LiveCosts.
- What I would also say is that when you’ve purchased it, whilst it’s fairly intuitive, there’s a lot in there, you’ve got to go and work with it.
- The guys are very good. You ask a question online, Patrick normally answers within two or three minutes. You’ve got plenty of videos online through YouTube. There’s plenty of support there.
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