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Eugene Engelbrecht formed his London building firm, Engel Construction, in 2009. The company offers all kinds of construction services, working on residential, commercial and other types of projects. "We do construction management, project management, demolition, groundworks, concrete frames and more," confirms Eugene.
"It's going well," he continues, describing how his relatively new business prospered even during the 2009 - 2010 construction slump. "We've got some good customers in and the work has continued. A lot of it's been long term projects, which has helped us through the bad patch. For starting out at probably the worst time possible, it's going extremely well."
Managing suppliers
As the company expanded, Eugene started to really feel the pressure of tracking the supplies he was purchasing to use on jobs. "With construction, you're buying materials, and a lot of them," he explains. "I'd been using Excel, but it was getting to the stage where invoices were coming in so fast that we couldn't keep up. Moving to an accounting package was the next step for us."
After evaluating several options, he settled on QuickBooks Online, which the business now uses to manage most aspects of its accounts - including day-to-day invoicing, cash flow tracking and VAT.
Having previously had to create invoices manually using Excel, Eugene was immediately impressed by QuickBooks. "Your templates are there," he enthuses. "You're only filling in the basic information - you don't have to replicate everything each time."
Meaningful cash flow reports
Another challenge common to construction firms like Eugene's is trying to monitor the various different jobs the business is working on at any given time. "We can have six, seven, eight or nine jobs on at once," reckons the busy builder. "But we need to track how each individual job is doing. QuickBooks allows you to set up divisions to do that for you."
Recalling a recent trip to South Africa, Eugene confirms that he's also made good use of the option to access his accounts from anywhere: "Business doesn't stop when you're abroad. I found it very helpful that I could just get on to any PC and carry on as if it was on my computer."
"It's definitely saved us time," concludes Eugene, describing how QuickBooks has given him breathing space to focus on more important business tasks. "It's enabled me to go out there and look for work, rather than sitting in an office doing nothing but uploading invoices. From that point of view, it's got me back to doing the things I need to do."
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