Urbanbubble’s magic button and how it quickly, easily and incredibly cost effectively saves them 27 hours of time each and every month. Who says bespoke software has to cost you a fortune… even if it saves you one?
Despite the best efforts of even the best technology it’s rare that it can do it all. Especially when you have a bunch of separate systems unwilling to communicate with each other – the transfer of information from one to the other too often a painstaking manual process.
Strange, isn’t it? The amount of work, that as well as saving, technology can actually generate.
Strange too how the addition of a single small fix, a tiny little interface can resolve those sorts of problems. In the case of the Coop/Qube data hook-up we designed for residential property management agent Urbanbubble, the not insignificant benefit of 27 hours of manual input every month.
“It wasn’t an expensive solution it was easily discussed, put in quickly and gave us a return from day one and has continued to work every day since” Andrea Thornhill, Business Support and Change Manager at Urbanbubble.
“It’s paid for itself back many times over,” she adds. “And it’s so easy to use that people don’t realise how much it’s doing for them. It’s just this little trusty thing that sits there working hard.”
Here’s the problem it solves
Every day Urbanbubble have to take information from 90 bank accounts. And every day that information covering potentially hundreds of invoices and receipts has to be entered into their Qube property management system and allocated against their 6 thousand tenant accounts.
Unfortunately Coop bank doesn’t allow a direct link to Qube.
“It used to be an incredibly arduous task,” says Andrea, “A line by line evaluation then copying and pasting into a master spreadsheet that could be entered into Qube.”
Time consuming. Prone to error. Unnecessary.
The Magic Button
The solution was right there in front of them but they just didn’t initially realise it. “We had to manually process it as opposed to what we wanted which was to be able to have one upload file that would go into Qube.”
“Now, We press a magic button and the Kaleida bank processor removes all the fiddling, all the copying and pasting,” says Andrea. “Now there’s no moving things onto one document and there’s no working out which are customer receipts and which are supplier payments.”
Though the 90 bank statements still need to be downloaded every day, now they’re dropped into a folder and by applying rules and checkpoints everything is put into separate tenant and supplier sheets. They’re then uploaded to Qube which either allocates the information to the correct supplier account if it was a Direct Debit or the correct leaseholder account if was a receipt.
How long has Kaleida’s magic button been saving time and money?
Every working day since mid-2014.
Think about it…
At the time of writing that’s 40 months @ 27 hours a month @ £30k a year salary
A £2.5k piece of software generating £33k worth of savings with those savings continually mounting up.
“Of course, I wouldn’t hesitate to use Kaleida again,” says Andrea. “It was really easy to go through the requirements, Cath and the team were really quick to pick things up and come back with a solution that with just a bit of testing was in.”
The key is in proving a positive Return On Investment. UrbanBubble did this and continue to see the benefits. Why don’t you take a free software review to work out just how much your business can save?
