We ran on Xero and Excel. Xero is a banking facility, money in and money out, and purchase orders were raised in it so suppliers had something to invoice against. Profitability per job was unknown. Cost per job were not tracked. A £100,000 tender estimate could be heading for £150,000, and nobody would know until it come to issue company accounts. Every purchase order now goes through a two-stage approval in Planyard. The admin team raises it, I check the value, cost code and project, and an owner signs it off. Invoices are matched to the order and approved the same way before they go across to Xero, so nothing gets paid that was never ordered or never done. I came from COINS at PLC house builders. Planyard is the simpler, easier version that give you’re the appropriate information, framework for commercial compliance but in a user friendly platform that has become a back bone for our business success.

We're a main contractor on the south coast running varied projects - schools, student accommodation, wineries, and care homes - ranging from a few hundred thousand to a few million pounds. As commercial manager I need to manage procurement, subcontractor payments, client valuations, and CVR reporting across all live projects. Our old system was clunky - I had a full page of handwritten notes just to set up a subcontractor order. It would freeze, take ages to load, and if something went wrong you'd lose half your day. With Planyard, I get my cost report in four clicks. Everything's in one section rather than clicking through three or four different places. We migrated all live projects at once and were up and running within a week. New QSs pick it up in a couple of goes - you sit down thinking there's a lot to learn, but once you start it clicks almost immediately. The Xero integration keeps accounting connected without double-handling, and Carl's support has been a hundred times better than anything we had before. If something needs adjusting to suit how we work, Planyard actually listens and does it. I'm already recommending Planyard to others in the industry. It gives us the commercial output we need - budget tracking, committed costs, subcontractor management, live visibility - but in a way that's genuinely user friendly.

We're a main contractor running a broad range of projects from private homes to university refurbishments and port work, typically £100k to £3.5m. Before Planyard, our CVRs lived in Excel - QSs would download reports from our old system, punch numbers into spreadsheets, and by the time we had a picture, the costs had already moved. We were always looking at yesterday's numbers. Planyard changed that completely. Budgets, orders, invoices, and committed costs are all connected in one place, so we can see where every project stands financially at a glance - no more rebuilding reports from scratch each month. The time saving alone has been massive. Our QSs can now focus on delivering projects rather than manually compiling figures that were out of date anyway. As a finance manager, cash flow visibility is crucial. In construction, you often have to upfront costs, and having a live sight of what's committed and what's coming helps me plan far more confidently. It also means our MD can make informed decisions based on real numbers rather than worrying about what he doesn't know. He even does some QS'ing on Planyard himself and is very pleased with the system. The integration with Xero works cleanly - accounting stays in Xero while Planyard handles the commercial project control layer on top. And the support has been outstanding. Our account manager feels like a member of our team at this point. Every question gets answered quickly via chat or quick sync calls. Planyard have actually implemented feature suggestions we've made, which we've never experienced with any other software provider! When implementing Planyard, we migrated all our live projects across in one go, and I'm glad we did. Now everything is running smoothly, and we have a live picture of all projects within a few clicks. Planyard gives us high confidence for sustainable growth for our company going forward.