Engineer Outlook Timesheet System for Civil / Structural Engineers

The Customer

Cronin & Sutton are a civil and structural engineering consultancy with around 60 staff. They design the civil elements of buildings such as the foundations, drainage, water, access to drains and sewage.

The Details

Cronin & Sutton are a civil and structural engineering consultancy with 3 offices across Ireland and the UK. Cora Sutton-Smith explains, “We design the civil elements of a job. Things like their foundations, drainage, water, access to drains and sewage. We are approximately 60 staff right now.”

What they were using

The company was using a system called Drive but had become dissatisfied with it. It was difficult to extract the reports they needed and decided to look for something else.

What they looked at

“I looked at Harvest and few other timekeeping platforms, but they didn’t handle projects the way we needed. All of our work is based on projects; we don’t do things by clients; we need project-based timekeeping. Then we came across Timewatch. When I did the demo with Timewatch, it ticked a lot more of the boxes than any of the others did. With Timewatch you can break projects down by Stage, and can also assign Activities.”

“Reporting was very good as well, and easy to manipulate in Excel. I really liked the drill-down reporting feature; you could easily drill down and create reports very quickly by just adding or removing columns to see what you wanted to see. We also needed billing – we use it for invoicing – and I thought the invoicing was very straightforward. The templates were very straightforward; there was nothing complicated about it.”

How Timewatch Helped

Phil Jones from Timewatch helped Cronin & Sutton see OutlookTime® and time and billing in action, and also worked with them through all of their functional requirements. As Phil explains, “Trialling software takes time, so if someone is looking at multiple systems, trialling them all takes a lot of time. My job is to save customers time. We provide them with access to resources so that customers are completely comfortable that our product will deliver what they need. This might be a number of demos, test drives, Q&A sessions with implementors. Whatever they need to help them, we provide. This also lets people experience a crucial part of any cloud solution – services.”

“We looked at a demo with Phil,” Cora explained. “He sent over prices, we reviewed them, there was a bit of back and forth over the terms and how it worked. We then revisited the demo to make sure we were happy with all the features. We then signed off on all the licenses we needed at the time.”

About the Implementation

“Implementation and setup took about two weeks”, says Sutton-Smith. “We had a lot of data we wanted to pull across from our old system, and Timewatch helps with that. There was also a fair bit of messing around with moving from one system to the other. I wouldn’t have expected it to take any less time. Timewatch helped with training with the admins, and we had some refresh training with the admins.”

The Results

After implementation, the results were clear, “Yes. It definitely does save time, and it ticks all the boxes. Compared to our old system and others we looked at, we save around two hours per week per person, at least if they were using OutlookTime ® and utilizing their Outlook calendars. It saves them a huge amount of time from reporting and a time analysis point of view. It saves us about 10 hours per month on that side as well.”