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Mazars Goes Live With
time@work
Mazars is the local division
of the European accounting firm. With 150 offices in 50
countries, 5,000 professionals, global turnover of EUR 500
million and offering a host of services, Mazars is one of
the leading auditing & accounting based partnerships in
Europe. Mazars has implemented time@work at its offices in
the Czech and Slovak Republics. With 65 employees and over
200 international customers, Mazars is a key local player.
Introduction
Mazars has grown dramatically
since opening in 1994 and has built up a large roster of
international clients. As so often happens with growing
organisations, the excel-based timesheet system was taking too much
time and effort to manage. In addition, getting data into the
accounting system was taking too long.
As well as the time burden, Mazars
management needed a reliable, systematic way to report on key
metrics like work in progress and employee utilisation.
Like many professional services
companies, Mazars offered a variety of services including outsourced
accounting, consulting, tax and payroll work. Each of these is
billed in different ways and often the same client may have several
services supplied by Mazars.
One of the key issues for Mazars
was the process between doing the work and producing the invoice.
Mazars bills in three ways:
- Time & Materials
- For payroll - number of
joiners and leavers, number of employees
- Fixed monthly fee
Additional work on fixed-fee
projects is usually charged on a time & materials basis, and Mazars
recharges many of its customers for third-party work.
The excel- and paper-based system
was becoming overloaded, the time demands were becoming too great
and there was always the risk of losing information as it went from
one system to another.
Selection
Erick Gillier, Accounting &
Consulting Manager, was tasked with implementing a solution and
looked at several different options. When asked about his decision,
Erick said "What finally made us select time@work was the security
of dealing with such an established company, the ongoing development
of time@work and the fact that systems@work seemed to really
understand our business - they knew how to make the link between the
accounting guy and the IT guy".
Solution
At the beginning of the year, all
contract values are entered into an invoicing schedule for the year.
Every month, employees enter their timesheets using the time@work
Timesheet client which ensures that the information is accurate by
validating standard hours, projects and various analysis categories.
Individual managers then check
timesheets and an invoice schedule is produced and forwarded to
Erick for review. When he is satisfied that the invoice information
is correct, physical invoices are produced and sent out to the
customers. The accounting department also receives a report
generated from employees' timesheets, so that they can produce
Mazars' internal payroll.
External expenses - both
incidentals and external invoices - are processed through time@work.
All the invoicing information needs to be recorded in the accounting
system, so time@work produces an export file in the structure used
by Mazars accounting system.
Although the first reason for
choosing a new system was the time and effort needed to go from work
to invoice, time@work has proved its usefulness in reporting as well
- now Mazars can see key corporate metrics like realised hourly
rates much more quickly and easily than before.
Benefits
"It is always difficult to give
definite figures to the improvements that a system like time@work
makes" commented Erick "especially as many of the benefits come
further down the road when you begin to realise the true potential".
However, since implementing
time@work, Mazars has found that the time it takes for accounting to
produce an invoice schedule has gone from 1 week to 1 day.
Additionally it used to take a
week to print invoices from the schedule, check and approve them -
time@work has improved this by 4 days.
Moving invoice data into the
accounting system used to take one day of re-keying and now this
procedure is automatic whilst the work to invoice cycle, reporting
and accounting, is a lot more secure because the entire process is
managed using time@work.
About Mazars
Mazars was founded in 1994, and
has over 5,000 staff based in 50 countries. Further information on
Mazars can be found at
http://www.mazars.com
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