As part of our research for this article, we called several of our Xero users in New Zealand and Australia. Many gave us both a verbal response and followed up with a more thoughtful email.
One was from Janine at a professional services firm of some 30 staff in Wellington, New Zealand. It really covered all the things every one of our respondents had raised. We print it here with her permission.
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Janine writes:
Before we had Abtrac we had another time billing system recommended by the accountant.
The trouble was we couldn't record the job scope to the level of detail we needed. And therefore we couldn't capture the timesheet detail we needed. And we couldn't invoice from it in the formats our clients wanted.
So we had Excel for timesheets. These were summarised and rekeyed into [the old system] really only for summary reporting. In particular one summary report gave some idea as to what we should be invoicing. But the project managers were all running their own spreadsheets for any project that wasn't a simple one-off or in-and-out job.
The invoices were done in Word. Then I re-keyed them into Xero.
Looking back now it's amazing we got by and made any money because at any time nobody had a full picture of what was going on. Different people each had their own files according to their involvement with each job.
And all the time we were paying monthly for our old system and it really was a waste of money. They had poor support and it was just 'take it or leave it'.
Then we found Abtrac. Someone came back from a training course and said “Let’s have a look at this”.
And the rest is history as they say.
We love the functionality of Abtrac and the ease of use of Xero. Linking Abtrac with Xero saves me about a day each month just by not having to re-key 40 invoices into Xero. That’s an estimated 80 hours a year.
We estimate it saves a further day per month for every one of us here because Abtrac is always ‘up’ and ready for anyone to enter timesheets, disbursements, run reports and access anything they need for any of the jobs they’re involved with. It’s a real, real time system. We’re not waiting for someone to close an Excel file nor worrying about over-writing an invoice in Word etc.
It also means we now run only two systems, and they talk with each other.
We estimate across the office Abtrac with Xero saves us the equivalent of a couple of admin salaries each year. That sounds a lot, but every month things add up when you think about it. And on top of that there’s the speed and reliability of having information at hand 24/7.
We don’t know how we did without it for so long.
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Janine and the company she works with has been using Abtrac for over 2 years now.
If you feel some similarities with your business and Janine's story above
Or take a look at what we can do with the Abtrac and Xero integration
If you have some specific questions about Abtrac then please call us or email.
We will be very pleased to respond.
If you are an existing client that would like to share your story with us we would love to listen.
