Hankinson Whittle use LiveCosts to:
- Track construction purchase orders
- Enhanced Xero reporting
- Keep Finance and Operations on the same page
About Hankinson Whittle
Hankinson is one of the leading Painting & Property Maintenance Contractors with offices throughout the UK and has completed over £100M in projects for major public and private sector clients. It offers a full range of services from commercial and industrial painting through to property maintenance solutions.
Visit www.hankinson.co.uk
Challenges
What problem were you trying to solve?
So there was no working solution in place. We’re a multi site operation, so we’ve got five different locations, and I think it’s fair to say that each site or division were doing things in their own way.
How was the problem affecting your business?
Each division were working in silos, they had controls and systems in place, some better than others. Essentially, we needed to standardise that process and our approach to contract costing.
What reservations did you have?
There are lots of different risks bringing any new system into place, I think specifically in LiveCosts. It was a relatively new product to market, which brings risks in itself. We’re going to ask ourselves, is it being tested properly, will it deliver on the functionality that you say it is? Will it evolve and meet our future needs?
Results
What are some of the main benefits of using LiveCosts?
- The biggest benefit has got to be the PO tracking. If that PO isn’t in place, you’re essentially going to be purchasing on a contract without authority. So having the PO tracker in place has been our number one benefit.
- It gives us insight on pending purchases before liabilities, land, which helps on cash flow projections, but also on the month end WIP valuations. So one of the previous issues we had were identifying invoice accruals. This really helps us.
- If we know that we’ve had receipt of services or receipt of goods, we’re pulling the cost in as a liability. So it’s those little things from quite a really basic piece of functionality that’s made a big impact on the business. I love the catalogue because I can go to all of our suppliers and get an up-to-date price list.
How much time does using LiveCosts save your business?
We know that time savings have been made because we’re spending our time on different tasks than we were previously.
I’ll give you an example. When we complete the WIP, the month end valuation process, historically we were dropping data out of Xero. We were sifting through and sorting it by job numbers. It was quite a manual process.
It could take probably a day, a day and a half. Now we can drop that same data out of LiveCosts within a matter of minutes. We pivot the data and then we pull it into valuation reports. So we can get five divisions done in a couple of hours, where previously that could have taken up to a day and a half. So we’re getting that time back to focus on understanding the numbers rather than processing transactions and reports.
What measurable benefits have you seen?
I think that month end WIP process is a lot slicker. Now when Finance and Operations leave the room, we’re all on the same page. There’s no massive queries around finance supposed to cost the wrong job, missing data, that type of thing. Which detracts from the process. So the removal of all those queries, has been a bit of a game changer.
Advice
What would you say to other people considering LiveCosts?
I’d say give it a go and don’t overthink it, because we’d looked at a few alternative add-ons to Xero, they just weren’t up to it. But you get to the point of overthinking it, so I think with these systems just say give or go.
I think the support function is fantastic to be able to click a button the bottom left of your screen, send a message and get a response within 5 minutes and know who’s talking to you. I’ve not experienced anything like that before, so it’s a really personable service which we’re more than happy with and I think that would add a benefit to a lot of businesses of our size within our sector.
