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IT Healthcheck - Last time for Excel system. By Simon Hurst

Last time we visited Chris Cooksey, of small accountancy practice Cooksey Perry, we left him dangling from the time and fees cliff edge. Should he persevere with the flexible but time consuming home-grown Excel system, or plunge headlong into a time and fees package?

During our initial consultation, we had suggested one benefit of a time and fees package was that it would provide the basis of an integrated practice management system. Chris uses IRIS for accounts production and tax, and therefore initially looked at that supplier's practice management system.

As we saw in our first follow up article, Chris was not convinced that the effort of implementing the system would result in enough benefits to make it worthwhile. However, instead of abandoning the idea altogether, he decided to approach the problem from the time and fees end.

Chris has now been using IRIS time and fees for a few months and is beginning to appreciate the benefits. "I think it really will help me," said Chris. "The difficulty will be transferring over the work in progress history from the old Excel-based system".

One of the great advantages of building your own system is the degree of flexibility you have. Chris had used this to ensure that he could record extensive narrative for each time entry. Chris was particularly pleased that the packaged system was also capable of recording information in this level of detail. However, this did also create a conversion issue. Chris is considering employing someone to enter the historical details from the Excel spreadsheets into the new system. Once this is done Chris expects to see some major benefits: "In future it will take a similar amount of time to enter the time records as for the old system, but the subsequent manual analysis and transfer of details will no longer be necessary."

Whilst Chris felt that, perhaps because he wasn't yet fully up to speed with the new IRIS system, it seemed to "have some holes and creak a bit here and there", overall he was positive, believing the new system would certainly "do the job". In fact, he is sure that the system will more than pay for itself, due mainly to the immediacy of recording all WIP.

Chris was brave enough to admit that, using the old system, it was not unknown at very busy times for him to produce invoices before the full WIP analysis had been completed. This could result in some of the work he had done being missed and remaining uninvoiced. The new system will make it much easier to ensure that all the work he has done will be invoiced correctly. On a topical note, Chris also felt that the system would make it much easier to generate the firm's overall WIP balance to take care of the requirements of the dreaded UITF 40.

As yet, Chris had only been using the system for recording WIP and not for invoicing. Because he has invoice templates set up for all his existing clients in Excel, it's very quick to adapt the invoice for the current year and print it out. He is intending to start using IRIS invoicing soon in order to keep his WIP records up to date.

Overall, Chris is happy with his decision to move away from his Excel system and may well have another look at the practice management issue once he has had more experience with the time and fees system. Demonstrating that a computer application itself is rarely a full solution to any IT problem, Chris paid tribute to the IRIS helpline system, describing it as "excellent, always very helpful." He did go on to make the mild criticism that 'always' didn't include Christmas week. Perhaps changes to filing deadlines might make this less of an issue in the future.

In spite of the effort required to get the new time and fees system up and running, Chris had found the time to consider some other recommendations from our previous meetings. He had purchased an up-to-date laptop computer to replace his rather elderly existing laptop and had implemented wireless networking to make it easy to connect the new computer to his existing network.

The improved specification of this new laptop has enabled Chris to extend the amount he can do out of his office and also provided an additional back-up mechanism. On the subject of back-up, Chris is giving serious thought to improving the automation of his already comprehensive back-up procedures, and is particularly keen to investigate online back-up options.

Another hardware purchase is also imminent. At our first meeting we suggested that a larger or additional monitor was a major contribution to power-user efficiency ' this is the next item on the Cooksey Perry IT shopping list.

IT Healthcheck - Cooksey Perry & Co, 2006

Where does IT hurt? - 24 Feb

Initial consultation - 24 March

Return to Cooksey Perry & Co - 24 May

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