The Client
WWT Consulting was established in 1989 at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, which is the headquarters of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust.The organisation is dedicated to providing high-quality, professional solutions for restoring, designing, creating, managing and interpreting wetlands and their species around the world.
All profits raised through the consultancy are gifted back to WWT to help support the charity’s conservation work.Offer any business something that will save them time and money, and you’d expect them to bite your hand off.
Yet using a dedicated time and expense management system is still something many companies and organisations fail to see a need for. Not so at Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust Consulting, however. The UK’s leading specialist wetland-related environmental consultancy, based at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, began working with Sage Coretime just over a year ago – and has nothing but praise for its benefits.
The Problem
“We used to produce individual timesheets in-house, using Excel to enter time against a project code,” explained office manager Monica Gilbertson.
“There are around 18 of us and, as a consultancy, all work has to be recorded so we know how much time is spent on each project. Whenever new people joined the company new projects were added and, at the start of each year, the spreadsheets had to be altered which was time-consuming, unwieldy and prone to errors.
The Solution
“Now, as soon as our consultants enter information in Coretime the system is instantly updated and can be accessed by everyone. We can analyse different budgets and the time spent on each activity as part of a project – it’s really useful.”
WWT Consulting used Onesys, a North Yorkshire-based software company, to supply the programme and get it up and running. Onesys is the major UK partner of Global Business Systems and Sage Professional Services Division.
“Onesys gave us a good demonstration of the product and thorough training – they’ve been really helpful,” said Matt Simpson, associate director of WWT Consulting. “Their support service is excellent too”
The Outcome
“For us, the main benefit is that our system is now more user-friendly in terms of project managers being able to access information, such as seeing how a project is performing against budget. They can analyse how time is being spent and what proportion of it is earning fees – it’s easy to translate.”
He added: “It’s cut the time spent on routine administrative tasks and enabled us to be more efficient, which means we can focus more on the actual projects. We can have around 20 live projects on the go at any one time and if a client wants a breakdown of where the time is going, we need to respond almost instantly. Coretime allows us to do this.”
Laurie Pottage Director of Sales at Onesys, said: “We’re delighted we were able to help WWT Consulting with a time-recording system that suited their needs. Many businesses and organisations see this kind of programme as a luxury, but it generally saves so much staff time and effort that it quickly pays for itself – people can concentrate on their jobs rather than administration”.
Onesys are the number 1 supplier of Sage Coretime in the UK with over 400 client installations.
Contact Onesys for more information on how Sage Coretime can help your Architects business.