Caulmert is an engineering, environmental and planning consultancy with ambitious growth plans. They work across multiple sectors, including commercial, education, healthcare, industrial, leisure, regeneration and waste management. As the business expanded from its origins with 3 staff to 24 full-time employees, it became clear that its existing systems (largely spreadsheets) could no longer support its growing workload. They needed what many consider the best timesheet engineering solution, one that supports remote offices, geographic spread, and varied project types.
Caulmert
About Caulmert
Founded in 2008 and active since 2009, Caulmert has its head office in North Wales and regional offices in Derbyshire and Cheshire. Originally focused on waste-management clients, they have diversified into wider engineering, planning, and environmental projects. As they scale, maintaining clarity of project time, cost, and resource usage has become critical to growth and profitability.
The Challenge
As Caulmert’s Finance Director, Donna Milne explains:
“When we first started the business … we needed to decide on a strategy to help us achieve that vision. Part of that strategy was to ensure that we had a robust time management system in place which could cope with our growth aspirations. As the company continued to grow it soon became evident, as predicted, that we couldn’t rely on using spreadsheets to manage our time and projects.”
They found that:
- Manual spreadsheet-based tracking was time-consuming and error-prone.
- There was a risk of under-billing on projects because costs hadn’t always been allocated correctly.
- With staff working in different offices (North Wales, Derbyshire, Cheshire), and sometimes outside the office, there was no centralised view of business performance at any moment.
- They needed a timesheet system that was accessible, easy to use, and provided clear performance visibility at any time.
In short: spreadsheets weren’t cutting it anymore for an engineering consultancy with plans to grow fast and deliver across multiple sectors.
The Solution
Coretime was chosen as Caulmert’s best timesheet engineering solution because it brought time tracking, project visibility, and administrative workflows into a single, web-based platform that all offices could access.
Key elements of the solution included:
- Web-based timesheet entry accessible by all employees, including those remote or off-site.
- Centralised project visibility: multiple small and large, ongoing projects managed via one system.
- Integration with their quality-management processes (ISO 9001) to ensure data compliance and audit-friendly tracking.
- Real-time dashboards and reporting tools giving visibility to project performance and overall business health.
- A user-friendly interface that made adoption easier for staff across offices and roles.
The platform enabled Caulmert to move beyond disparate spreadsheets to a unified system for logging time, monitoring projects, and ensuring billing accuracy.
Implementations
Here’s how the rollout was handled at Caulmert:
- System Selection & Planning: Caulmert recognised the need to adopt a better timesheet engineering solution as part of its strategy for scalable growth.
- Configuration: Project templates, roles, and remote-office permissions were configured so that timesheet entry was consistent across regions.
- Data Migration: Historical time-tracking data from spreadsheets imported into Coretime to maintain continuity of records.
- Training & Onboarding: Staff in North Wales, Derbyshire and Cheshire offices received training on how to use Coretime for their day-to-day logging.
- Monitoring & Feedback: After launch, dashboards were monitored and user feedback collected to tweak user roles / reporting to match real workflows.
Within a short period after go-live, project leads and management began using the Coretime dashboards to view time allocation, monitor project status, and make decisions with confidence.
The Results
Since implementing Coretime as their timesheet engineering solution, Caulmert has seen visible improvements:
- Staff across remote and local offices now use a single system for timesheet entry, reducing duplication and inconsistency.
- Project and business performance visibility has improved substantially. As Donna says:
“With staff based at different office locations and sometimes different parts of the world, having Coretime has brought us all together using one easily accessible web based system. It allows us to manage many small projects as well as those large and complex projects over extended time periods. It’s responsive, quick and effective and gives us great project visibility.”
- Mike Caulfield, Managing Director adds:
“When you are trying to grow a business, time can soon run away from you. When we implemented Coretime, there was a clear transition from previously spending a lot of time administering spreadsheets and then still not being able to see information clearly. Now we have immediate visibility on the performance of individual projects and our business as a whole.”
- Coretime has integrated with their quality-management systems and supported their ISO 9001 accreditation process.
These changes have helped Caulmert gain clarity, reduce admin friction, and support their growth strategy more reliably.
Looking Ahead
With Coretime deeply embedded as their timesheet solution, Caulmert expects to continue leveraging the platform as they expand their services and regional footprint. It provides a solid foundation for future reporting modules, tighter project-cost control, and enables scalable administrative workflows aligned with their long-term vision.
If you’re searching for the best timesheet engineering solution for your consultancy one that enables remote usage, trusted reporting and business-wide visibility Coretime can help.
What’s next?
Get in touch with us. Only by getting a good understanding of your business requirements can we recommend a solution.
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