Airfirst comes up for air with Greentree’s aid

The Queensland air-conditioning company had a major data re-entry problem and more before moving to Greentree’s single-source system…

Airfirst is an air conditioning and electrical contracting company that undertakes installation, services and project-based work for domestic and commercial customers in North Queensland.

The company had been struggling with two disconnected accounting systems that required every transaction to be extracted from Smart Trade and then re-entered and modified in MYOB. Administration manager Beth Borzi says the situation was “crazy” and that’s before the amount of time wasted trying to maintain a manual stock book is included in the equation.

Paying staff was a major headache too, since payroll wasn’t integrated with job costing, so thus data needed to be re-entered. This predisposed the system to error, so accuracy in the capture of all job costs couldn’t be guaranteed.

Industry-specific ERP not right
Having spent three years looking for a replacement, Borzi recalls evaluating all the usual suspects. These included Microsoft Dynamics and SAGE, alongside project and service industry-specific software from iPROsoft, among others.

Greentree was finally chosen because it is a fully integrated, flexible, single-source system capable of scaling to meet the company’s future needs. It also offers a strong contracts management capability, which allows Airfirst to proactively manage and grow the service and maintenance component of its business.

Pinpoint accuracy
Since Airfirst is a project- and services-oriented organisation, job costing needs to be pinpoint accurate to ensure the company remains competitive and profitable. Borzi says costs were being entered into Smart Trade, then extracted and re-entered in MYOB. 

“This was a ridiculously tedious and time-consuming process, but it was the only way we could keep track of costs and allocate them to the job before invoicing. Greentree’s integration, and, specifically, its fully integrated payroll system, has been invaluable. I now know that all relevant costs are being captured and allocated against jobs.”

Since Greentree is a single-source system, data is entered only once but can be easily viewed by all authorised users. Airfirst’s project managers now have much greater visibility and control of project costs, which has translated into more accurate job costing.

Admin cut by a day a week
There have been several flow-on effects now that Airfirst doesn’t have to deal with double-handle data entry. Borzi estimates she’s spending at least a day a week less on data management tasks, and more time on financial analysis and, specifically, looking more closely at chargeable and non-chargeable time. For example, she has been able to make more productive use of down-time, which previously wasn’t contributing anything to the bottom line.

With a good proportion of business revenue coming from service contracts, Borzi now uses Greentree to schedule maintenance contract work during periods of down-time. A lot of this is outside the busiest period of the year, November and February, when households need to keep cool during the hot Queensland summer.

Borzi says Greentree has helped her better manage cash flow, by smoothing out business revenue over whole the year. Now, down-time contributes to the bottom line, with Greentree providing the tools to grow this part of the business in the future.

Stock-take: from two days to two hours
Borzi says that previously materials such as copper piping and wiring simply weren’t included in a stock-take.

This was because Smart Trade and MYOB didn’t have the capability required to store this information. Each year, the business installs around 1,100 units, consisting of 2,200 parts and serial numbers, which, Borzi says, presented another logistical nightmare, as they all had to be recorded in a manual stock-book.

When Greentree’s serial tracking automated the tracking of units, the stock-book was quickly ditched. A stock-take now includes all materials and is completed in about two hours – rather than the two days it used to take. As a result, Airfirst now has much greater control of its finances and accuracy has been significantly improved.





> Greentree International
Graham Hill
P: 0800 313 313
F: 09 366 3889
E: graham.hill@greentree.com
W: www.greentree.com








10/5/11_ex

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