Starting a small business is tough. Anyone who takes the plunge often gets started by putting their assets on the line and ends up working like crazy to make things work. Many businesses start off being run on Excel spreadsheets which track income and expenditure, do quotes and invoices, but there comes a point where the business has expanded to the point it needs a piece of software essential to any company – an accounting package. The entry-level accounting software market is dominated by two major players – MYOB and Quicken – with a gaggle of smaller players such as MoneyWorks, BizWizz and Attache competing for the leftovers.

But what happens when a company grows beyond the capabilities of its existing accounting software? Quite often it can lead to organised chaos and a massive degradation of productivity, at the very least in the accounts department and often across the entire organisation. This was certainly the case prior to Calvert Technologies’ implementation of Happen Business’s Jim2^® process-driven accounting software and eBusiness suite.

Calvert Technologies is an Adelaide-based systems integrator specialising in networking infrastructure for small businesses. The company was set up by Dean Calvert in May 1996, and in 12 years has grown to employ seven people, with plans to expand to 11 by the end of 2008, and an annual turnover of $1.7 million. Like many small businesses, Calvert Technologies started off with one of the two major accounting packages, but two years ago found the business’s growth had completely outstripped the software’s capabilities.

“From an accounting perspective, we were hitting the limits of what the existing software could do for our business – particularly when it came to tying in with the sales side of the business,” said Dean Calvert. “We didn’t have a way of tracking stock properly so we’d order product in and couldn’t tie it back to where we sold it to the client. As a result, we found that stock we didn’t know about was going out to customers and it wasn’t always being invoiced properly, or at all. If we had to track something that had been sold to a customer, we couldn’t tie it back to the original supplier’s invoice.”

Putting it another way, there was no continuity or workflow throughout Calvert Technologies’ whole sales and supply process. And the situation was equally bad for the service side of business. “We were using Outlook calendars to run our service team,” said Calvert. “When any service work was done, we’d take the details out of the Outlook calendar and turn it into an invoice in the existing accounting package, a process that was very time consuming and very messy.

“If technicians were sharing a job or just going back and forth to the client site, there was no place where all that job information was held together. The accounting, the sales and supply and the servicing side of the business had all outgrown our accounting software and as we were getting bigger and busier with more jobs, and more complex jobs, going on it became a real nightmare.”

Calvert engaged with an accounting consultant who wholeheartedly recommended Happen Business’s Jim2^® package. By this time Dean Calvert was so desperate to get a replacement package that after checking that Jim2^® could do most of what he needed it to, he took the plunge and signed up without looking at any of the competition.

Happen Business managing director, Paul Berger, describes Jim2^® as a fully integrated, all-in-one system and most importantly for companies such as Calvert Technology, the service module is a fundamental component of the system. “Tracking of conversations is also an important factor,” said Berger. “If someone calls up, it’s tracked. Jim2^® is also very workflow- and business process-oriented. Most people think it’s an accounting software package, which it is, but the workflow and business process becomes a very natural part of how you do business. It helps you instead of getting in the way.”

Calvert’s faith in the product’s capability has been rewarded, however, as his company saw virtually immediate benefits from the implementation. “Jim2^® fixed the problem in terms of accounting processes almost immediately. For example, sending out statements used to take several hours. When we went to do it with Jim2^®, it took two minutes – that was a very pleasant surprise.”

“It’s totally improved efficiency from the accounting side of things. We’re able to track product that’s on order, back order, update the status of ETAs with product sales and do serial number tracking. From the services perspective we can create a service job, assign different technicians and the information sharing, which was totally absent when we were using Outlook, is now available.”

Return on investment is a critical factor for any business and it’s even more so for small businesses with their very real capital constraints. “The productivity efficiencies gained from being able to do a two-hour job in two minutes and being able to capture much more information means the Jim2^® implementation has paid for itself inside 12 months,” said Calvert. "I don’t have a quantitative ROI but I reckon it’s less than 12 months and as an owner of a small business you kind of know when something’s working or not working.”

As well as reducing costs, Jim2^® has also lead to a noticeable jump in customer satisfaction. Invoices are going out, and on time, and customers are able to get an update on the progress of a job far more easily than ever before. “If a customer is working with one technician on an issue and that technician is unavailable, another technician can see that information and talk to the customer about it,” Calvert said.

“As a result, there are no technicians saying, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know about that job, I’ll have to get someone to call you back.’ And our invoicing and financial closure process is working well, we’re building a routine around those sort of regular functions and the invoices look professional, they’re going out in a timely manner and there’s one invoice for multiple jobs. Our customers have been so impressed, we’ve actually had feedback saying ‘you’ve got a new system, it looks good'."

Jim2^® worked straight out of the box for Calvert Technologies, but Dean Calvert admits he made it easy for himself by deciding to start with a clean slate instead of trying to import all the historical data. “With IT kit a particular server might sell for four months and then the model or part number changes, so I decided it didn’t make sense to input a whole lot of historical part numbers.”

For Calvert one of the biggest challenges with the implementation was the sheer capability of the software. “It had a steep learning curve. I developed a headache every day during the week of implementation because I was the internal evangelist for Jim2^® and I had to know all the bits and pieces so I could keep getting the information and training out to the staff.”

Indeed, Calvert believes that although the company’s business is IT the decision to get in an implementer from Happen Business was the best decision he could have made. “Some people try to implement Jim2^® themselves and my advice is don’t. Don’t try and do it yourself. Get an implementer in, get help from Happen Business. It’s a critical tool for the business, it’s not like a new version of Microsoft Office, and we just would not have been able to do it as well on our own.”

So is there anything that Calvert would do differently? “I would put it in earlier. We batted on with the old software and all the old processes for far too long.”

Workflow in Jim2^® is a key component of capabilities, but Calvert said taking advantage of this functionality has been a gradual process. “We’ve been doing bits and pieces, but we certainly haven’t sucked the fat out of it. We use functions like the different statuses you can have in a job, handing jobs from one technician to another but there is still a lot more we can do with it.”

While Calvert Technologies is yet to scratch the surface of what Jim2^® can do in some areas, in others it’s been instrumental in helping Happen Business improve the package. “I’ve given feedback to Happen about new features we want in there and they’ve actually put some of those features into subsequent updates of the product. Being able to say, ‘this what I want and this why I want it’ and have it happen is a great advantage that goes with being a local supplier.”

And Calvert Technologies also has big plans for expanding its use of Jim2^®. “We’re trying to get ourselves organised to put the web front end which will allow techs out in the field to update job records from a web browser or hand-held device. The next step will be having customers putting their own jobs in and we’re basically just going to expand on the core feature set of Jim2^®. Out of the box it addresses about 90 percent and as the business grows and develops I’ll be getting the various modules into place until it gets to 100 percent.”