Based in Reading, Woolf Bond Planning is a planning consultancy specialising in delivering bespoke planning services for large-scale residential and commercial developments across the UK.
Before working with Hyphen Digital, Woolf Bond Planning ran its projects in Excel and Word. A master spreadsheet held every project. Planners logged their timesheets and expenses in Word documents, project by project. It worked, in the sense that jobs got delivered and invoices went out. What it couldn’t do was tell anyone whether a project was actually profitable or whether all variations had been billed. Those questions didn’t get answered until the work was finished.
The real problem came when Woolf Bond Planning was acquired by a larger group. The new parent company’s auditors wanted accurate WIP (work in progress) reporting, tracked project by project and provable on demand. Their current way of working had no way to produce it. There was no route from spreadsheet to sign-off. In addition, there was no way for Woolf Bond Planning itself to see outstanding WIP per project, what had been allocated to an invoice and what had been written off.
Hyphen implemented WorkflowMAX and integrated it with Xero. The migration from their existing spreadsheets and Word documents, and the training for the team, took just over a month from kickoff to go-live. Woolf Bond Planning has since moved up to the Advanced tier for the extra functionality, such as WIP reporting, capacity planning and integration with their Outlook calendars.
At the time of writing, Woolf Bond Planning has been using WorkflowMAX daily for 2 months. In this short amount of time, they’ve highlighted two big wins:
The creation of invoices no longer sits with one person; each planner can raise their own invoices with timesheet WIP allocation for finance and leadership to approve. Once approved, they auto-sync to Xero.
WIP visibility is now available on every project. All timesheets and costs are displayed, with a clear indication of which are billable, which are non-billable and which have been associated with an invoice. Woolf Bond can look at an individual project and see the open WIP as it stands today. Instead of reconstructing it after the fact.
Woolf Bond Planning’s advice for anyone considering a move
When asked if they had any advice for another practice considering a move to a project management system, Woolf Bond Planning’s advice was simple: “It’s absolutely worth doing, particularly if you’re already on an accounting package like Xero. It makes life easier for everyone: the people entering time, the job managers handling invoicing, and leadership who actually want to see profitability, productivity and capacity utilisation.”
Their one warning: Don’t try to implement it yourself. Use a partner who knows the platform.
“Josh from Hyphen Digital has been extremely helpful throughout the entire process of implementing WorkflowMAX. He is very knowledgeable about the product and WorkflowMAX’s capabilities and features, and applied this knowledge to our business processes, suggesting improvements along the way. Josh is always friendly and approachable and deals with our requirements in an intelligent and thoughtful manner. I would not hesitate to recommend Josh.” – Helle McArthur, Finance Manager, Woolf Bond Planning
