Greentree improves climate at air-conditioning company

Gold Coast-based electrical and air conditioning company JGP used to spend almost a week getting its end-of-month accounts out. Now the company is using Greentree, regular financial statements are produced in an automated and painless process…

Kym Thompson, financial controller at John Goss Projects (JGP), used to spend many hours a month manually preparing the payroll and job costings for the Queensland-based electrical and air-conditioning company. She also had to face the complexity of manually combining payroll data for 200 employees in far flung locations which were stored on disparate systems.

When JGP decided to radically overhaul its existing system its key priorities were integration and automation of its financial analysis and reporting, with a solution that was simple to use and would provide connectivity now and into the future.

The company spent some time carefully and thoroughly evaluating several system options after discounting the idea of ‘fixing’ the incumbent systems.

What turned out to be a two year evaluation process could hardly be called a ‘snap decision’ so when the decision was finally made to implement several Greentree modules, JGP was confident it had done its homework.

Payroll, Job Costing and General Ledger integration saves time
With a diverse workforce of 200 employees covered by four Enterprise Bargaining Agreements the processing of payroll was somewhat complex so Thompson looked long and hard at what Greentree had to offer.

Greentree’s Payroll module integrates with its Job Costing so payroll costs can be directly charged to jobs, and two-way integration with other Greentree modules would save a lot of time for JPG.

"Integration with job costing and general ledger has saved many hours of manual entries," Thompson says, and she sees huge potential to further streamline the costing and payroll processes.

Excel extraction – frees-up time for critical analysis and reporting
Thompson is also enthusiastic about the potential Greentree offers for extracting and manipulating data stored in Excel spreadsheets to create reports. Most financial management people are already familiar with Excel and Greentree’s ability to drill-down, extract and create user-defined reports makes the whole process painless.

Thompson says Excel data extraction has automated job costing reports and financial statements which previously took four days to produce. "With valuable time saved, focus can be shifted to critical analysis of outputs and improvements in systems."

On-line help is actually helpful
Thompson says she was surprised to find that Greentree’s on-line help was actually "very helpful." "Rather than the usual direction of ‘put this in that box’ there is some explanation of the options and integration process."

Phased implementation - little disruption to business continuity
Thompson says the Greentree partner was very capable and implementation was completed on time and within budget. She says the phased installation was "a huge advantage – with no hard close off from one system to another, balances and historical [data] could be loaded over two weeks while still entering the current month’s data."

Furthermore she says that staff at JGP, particularly the payroll staff, have really taken to the software. The familiar Windows-based environment meant little time was needed for training and, coupled with on-time phased implementation, this resulted in minimal disruption to business continuity.

As far as Thompson is concerned Greentree has delivered what it promised by solving the integration and automation problems created by the use of disparate systems and manual processes.

"We have only scratched the surface of the range of functions in Greentree and are excited by the possibilities for the future incorporation of other technologies and greater communication with our branches in other States."

For more information

www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/john_goss_projects.cfm

Graham Hill
(09) 366 3897
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

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