MJ Flood

MJ Flood modernises workflow with upgrade to cloud-accounting solution.

Tara Moran, Finance Manager, discusses how cloud-based Job Costing functionality has transformed business efficiency at MJ Flood.

Tell me about MJ Flood?

MJ Flood specialises in the supply of copiers, digital technology, office furniture and interiors to businesses throughout Ireland. Our Interiors and Interior Contracting divisions are the first companies within the group to move to iplicit.

What are the day-to-day demands that are typically placed upon your finance system?

From the sales rep point of view, we need projects set up very frequently. On each project there will be a considerable amount of activity regarding procurement. The Admin staff are busy using the system day-to-day regarding numerous queries that arise around various items on any job. Then at the end of the month, I review the project status and close projects accordingly. The management accounts are prepared based around projects closed within the month,.

We need a system to keep a close eye on invoice authorisations while providing up-to-the minute reporting on our cash positions and be able predict accurate forecasts, regarding future cash requirements per project, to ensure nothing is delayed unnecessarily.

What led to your decision to change systems?

We were struggling with the restrictions of the previous system around job/project costing because in order for us to use the solution it offered, we had to use their stock solution. As we don’t operate on a stock basis as we order to demand this wasn’t an efficient option for us. We had to maintain a large amount of Excel spreadsheets to work around the requirements of the system.

A fundamental issue, in the way we operate, is that we have hundreds of thousands of items that we can supply as part of an project. For instance, a single office chair can have a multitude of finishes; as a result, the permutations across any single contract are so vast that it would require a complex stock system in place for what is actually a simple transaction. Therefore, we are very much a project-based business where we order everything to demand and we needed a system that could provide job-costing on a project-by-project basis.

Under the old system I had to cost all the jobs manually and we had an extremely paper-based workflow; large paper files for every project that I’d frequently have to go through. For large multi-million projects this was extremely time consuming and tedious. I had to cost all projects on Excel and then reconciling that back to the transactions processed through the previous software. Maintaining an accurate Work in Progress figure was immensely challenging and time consuming. As our PO system was Excel based, we were faced with huge challenges getting an accurate GRNI figure at year end.

What was your key criteria for a new system and why did you choose iplicit over the other systems being considered?

Project-based job costing without requiring a stock system was paramount. In addition, having a cloud-based system was a key consideration. Interestingly though, when we set out to evaluate our options, having decided to upgrade our accounting software, being a true-cloud solution wasn’t on our list of key criteria. However, the more we learned about the benefits, and the more we saw the power of what we could achieve, we soon added it as a ‘must have’ when reviewing possible solutions.

Being able to integrate iplicit with Trax, our company-wide document management system was also a compelling factor when considering our options. 

We’d had several calls with possible vendors; Sage, Netsuite, SAP Business One and a couple of others and one of the reasons that we chose iplicit was because of its flexibility to be configured around our business and the way we needed it to work. Other systems we reviewed seemed very rigid in comparison; we were often told ‘it can’t do this or it can do that’ – a sort of ‘like it or lump it’ approach, whereas the iplicit team was much more focused on what we needed to achieve as a Finance Team.

Since going live with the system, how has your general experience been with both the software and iplicit staff?

Really good! I’ve been really happy with the staff at iplicit. We had a quick turnaround between choosing iplicit and going live as we wanted to go live at the beginning of our financial year; as such we didn’t get to spend as much time planning as we should have. As a result, we made several changes during implementation but everyone In iplicit has been very obliging to make sure that we get the system that we need. Brian, Tommy and Pat have been our main contacts and they’ve been a pleasure to deal with.

As for the product itself, I just love it! Everything is so easy and so accessible, and it has a very modern user interface. With our old system, to get information out of it wasn’t just a click of a button; we’d have to go in and run different reports and do VLOOKUPs from one report to another to get everything together in the format we required. Whereas with iplicit, I can just click a button and it goes into Excel, stick it into a pivot and I have what I want; it’s so much easier to use.