Case study No. 3. Self employed IT Contractor saves €3500

Dublin based IT professional providing support for SMB’s

The Client

The self employed contractor specialised in high quality support, installation and consultancy services for all manner of companies in the Dublin area, with a special focus on Microsoft technologies. These would include Exchange 2000 / 2003 / 2007, MS SSQL 2000 / 2005 / 2008 and all windows server systems. He would also have contracts in place to monitor and maintain networks for clients as well as performing one off installation jobs. Purchasing of items would be ad hoc at best and usually whilst out on the way to a clients site.

Areas where the business were losing time and money.

1. Purchasing of items relating to the client not being billed back.
2. End of year accounts taking longer than was necessary due to lost paperwork.
3. Business related purchases being forgotten about.
4. Cash flow was poor due to insufficient visibility of due invoices.

Action Taken

A single POcontrol.com licence was implemented, with the contractor now creating purchase orders for all items purchased as soon as he got to the clients site. At the same time the invoices were input to the system and at the month end a simple report run to show outstanding invoice totals.

Results

1. Many items that had been purchased and forgotten about now started to appear on the accounts. This lead to tax savings as items that had been purchased with the clients own money had not been included in his expense reporting.
2. Greater revenue as smaller purchased items such as blank CDR’s and Ethernet cables were now billed back to the client.
3. Much better cash flow.
4. Quicker end of year accounts.

Savings Calculations