Our goal from day one has be as efficient as possible utlising technology. Planyard is a big part of how a five-person sprinkler contractor runs around 70 live jobs. Without it we'd have an office administrator, a quantity surveyor and an extra accounts person on the payroll by now, which is well over £100k a year in salaries before employer's NI and pensions. The Xero integration is most of the reason we don't need that accounts person. Supplier bills and sales invoices go across to Xero on their own, so we stopped creating projects in Xero and assigning costs by hand. Funny thing is, we only moved from QuickBooks to Xero because Eque2 Construction Manager needed it. We spent the best part of a year on that system, with half-day training blocks and pages that took ten minutes to load, before switching to Planyard. Now the Xero link is one of the main reasons we're glad we did. The projects page makes me sleep easy at night. I can see the margin still to be made across every live job, and when the bank balance drops and I start wondering what's gone wrong, I can see which invoices just haven't been paid yet. I'd like a native mobile app, but the web version works fine on an iPad from the side of the road. As long as we trade, this is the platform.

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.