iDesign Solutions rely on TimeFiler for accurate job costing information

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TimeFiler has allowed iDesign to effectively project manage jobs whilst significantly reducing administration downtime.

iDesign Solutions specialises in commercialising products using mechanical and industrial design for many clients throughout New Zealand. They also have a portfolio of their own products. As the company grew it became clear a system was required to easily manage the consultancy service, enabling staff to project manage their jobs and overall development budgets. Integrating with their accounting software at month end also saves administration down-time hours.

Who are iDesign Solutions?

iDesign Solutions is a Christchurch-based product design and commercialisation consultancy. Formed in 2005, iDesign offers a complete development solution from product definition and specification, concept development, detail engineering, test specification through to production and commercial success.

Looking for a job costing solution

With each client having 10+ projects on the go at once, which last anywhere between two weeks and 12 months, a system to manage time on each job was critical for the organisation.

“Before TimeFiler, we used paper timesheets
and Microsoft Excel, which then had to be manually entered into our accounting software”, says Lincoln Sell, Company Director. “This was
not only time-consuming but we also had no way of knowing how many hours other staff were spending on the same project.”

Advantages of using TimeFiler

Providing an online centralised system has greatly improved job costing and project management processes at iDesign Solutions.

All staff use TimeFiler everyday to keep job costing information up to date, which allows project managers to see at a glance how jobs are tracking to budgeted costs and overall company performance. Reports can be run at any stage and outputted in PDF or CSV format, with reports easily configured to review the required data for staff or clients.

“I love being able to see who has been working
on the jobs I am responsible for, making sure
that time is not being wasted and our clients
are being serviced as required”, says Mr Sell. “TimeFiler provides accountability which is so important in a consultancy company like ours.”

Integrates with Accounting software

“We have saved at least three hours at the end of each month by eliminating the need to enter data manually into our accounting software”, says Lincoln. “This might not sound like a lot but we are a small organisation and that was significant for us - it more than covers the cost of the software.”

Provides transparency to our clients

iDesign Solutions generate reports which are given directly to their clients to provide transparency of project costs and how projects are tracking. Since TimeFiler is an online system, clients could log into TimeFiler themselves and view only their own information. “We will probably consider this in the future”, says Lincoln.

“TimeFiler also has a fantastic notes feature. This means we can add comments to the timesheet against individual entries. This has proven invaluable when clients have questioned on us on the number of hours against a particular job or activity.”

TimeFiler listens to our needs

“One of the key reasons we chose TimeFiler is that we didn't have to conform to the limitations of a job costing software application”, says
Lincoln. “We got to decide what pieces of information we wanted to capture on the timesheet - no more and no less.”

Lincoln believes that TimeFiler is very client focussed, and listens to their needs. “Enhancements to our system over the past 12 months have included changes that we specifically requested; they make us feel important with a personal touch.”

“As iDesign continue to grow staff numbers, we will take a closer look at the leave request module. It's great that adding such value-added functionality to our system won't increase our monthly fee since TimeFiler's fees are not module-based”, he says. “We would thoroughly recommend TimeFiler to any company looking to capture employee time efficiently and accurately.”

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