insightsoftware Training and Support Help Perkins Builders Maximize Its Spreadsheet Server Investment

For more than 50 years Perkins Builders has been providing superior service to its commercial construction clients, putting safety first and delivering exceptional work. As one of the largest regionally based construction companies in Western Australia, Perkins Builders has a well-established reputation for building commercial, industrial, civil, education, and healthcare facilities that stand the test of time.

New Opportunities, New Challenges

When Group Finance Manager, Octavia Woodfield, joined Perkins Builders, she already had a strong background in construction finance but faced new challenges learning how to manage an unfamiliar ERP and reporting processes. Perkins used Viewpoint Vista for enterprise resource planning and Spreadsheet Server from insightsoftware for financial reporting, a combination that Woodfield hadn’t worked with previously but was excited to learn.

“We’ve got so much software compared to back in the day when everything was manual,” Octavia explained. “You don’t have to manually feed data from one system to another; the data is pulled from the tables within the software.”

Simplified Reporting with a Single Source of Truth

Financial reporting is no small task for any business, but it can be particularly complicated for construction companies. It’s not uncommon for organizations to need to pull data from three or more systems and dump it into Excel for formatting before a single financial report can be created.

“I’ve been really lucky, to come here where they already had Viewpoint Vista, and it’s the main software we use,” Octavia said. “Everyone just puts their information into Vista, so I only have to deal with one software for my information source.”

While having only one ERP system to work with made learning the new software and processes easier, learning it was still a challenge. Thankfully, Spreadsheet Server was able to simplify the reporting process and ease Octavia’s transition to Viewpoint Vista.

“With Viewpoint, the financial reports are not the best, but when I found Spreadsheet Server on the other side of that, it actually made my life a lot easier. In fact, we don’t use any of the financial reports that print or export from Vista; everything is done via Spreadsheet Server.”

Octavia prefers Spreadsheet Server for Perkins Builders’ financial reporting because if offers:

• ERP data exports directly to Excel – no manual downloads or data dumps
• Real-time data – ERP data automatically updates so data is never stale
• Pre-formatted reports – building reports is easy with pre-built templates and a drag-and-drop report creator

“I can say I love my work more because of the software.”

Training and Support Facilitate Better Outcomes

Product Education

Octavia knew she faced a steep learning curve as a new user to both Viewpoint Vista and Spreadsheet Server. She found an excellent starting point in Spreadsheet Server’s pre-built financial reports, as they made using the software immediately accessible, but Octavia was glad insightsoftware offers product training to support user success.

“We organized some training so I could learn how to do the design side of it,” said Octavia. “I knew what I wanted when I did the training, so we built the first session around how to build custom report I needed and the next few sessions focused on troubleshooting – why are formulas not working as expected, etc.”

By taking advantage of Spreadsheet Server product training and education, Octavia was able to begin immediately creating not just templated financial reports but custom payroll reports. Reporting processes that would have taken hours if done manually can now be done in minutes with Spreadsheet Server.

“What I do now that the model’s been set up is literally change the date range, like this fortnight dates, and run the worksheet. All the data goes in the table automatically,” Octavia explains. “If I were to run the report in Viewpoint, I would actually need to run quite a few reports and none of those come to Excel in the format that you want them in to be usable; I’d have to reformat them all.”

Product Support

Part of Octavia’s success in learning Spreadsheet Server has been due to the accessibility of support services from insightsoftware. “I couldn’t get support,” she said in reference to her previous software solutions. “I had to go through their website to learn how to use it, but there was not a person on the other side that said, ‘this is what you do, this is how you do it.’ In contrast, the experience I’ve had with Spreadsheet Server has been so much better.”

Spreadsheet Server provides client support such as:

• Answering product questions
• Troubleshooting issues and errors
• Regular communication of updates
• Resource sharing within a user community

“Having that support, it’s amazing just being able to open a case or go into the community, have a look and see what other people have done,” Octavia says. “I don’t have programming skills, and you don’t need programming skills with Spreadsheet Server. There’s help there and you can get as much or as little as you need to be able to build your own reports.”

Plans for the Future

Now that Octavia has mastered financial reporting and payroll reporting with Spreadsheet Server, her next goal is to improve project reporting and further streamline reporting processes at Perkins Builders. She also plans to share her knowledge with her team as she continues mastering skills within Spreadsheet Server. By encouraging her team to take advantage of ongoing training and support, she hopes to further enhance collaboration and efficiency.

To see how Spreadsheet Server and insightsoftware’s training and support services can help your organization, schedule a demo today.