Benefits of Payapps for New Era Group:
- No training needed and easy to adopt across the entire team
- Standardised format and process for payment claims
- Creates a streamlined and efficient month-end process
- Improves visibility, trust and working relationships
- Centralised repository for important compliance documents required for payment approvals
New Era is a leading electrical and telecommunications contractor that specialises in the rail, infrastructure and transport sectors. The business works as a subcontractor to large general and specialist construction companies, and is engaged on a number of major projects including the Sydney Metro.
New Era has attained the status of Authorised Engineering Organisation (AEO #127) as certified by the Asset Standards Authority (ASA), recognising their experience, capabilities and competencies.
How streamlining a slow, manual process led to a new era of efficiency
Like many subcontractors in the construction industry, New Era Group relied on their project managers to prepare monthly payment claims using spreadsheets which was a very time-consuming process.
Once they started using Payapps, New Era Group benefitted from a significant improvement in the efficiency of their payment claims process, with a significant reduction in the time to prepare and submit payment claims every month across a number of projects.
When you use Payapps you will get paid faster. It helps streamline the preparation of your paperwork ensuring you submit it in an orderly and timely manner.
Scott Darke | Director, New Era Group
A paperwork nightmare every month that caused payment delays
As an experienced subcontractor running multiple projects of different sizes at any moment in time, New Era had long dealt with the issue of submitting progress claims on their numerous projects and having them approved by clients.
Adopting their own methods of preparing and submitting claim paperwork, mainly in the form of spreadsheets, New Era project managers did a lot of work each month to prepare their claims and submit them to clients.
While all clients had a similar method of receiving and entering the claims, inevitable differences in spreadsheet and paperwork formats led to errors of data entry. Time was often wasted while client confirmations of New Era claims in a given month were reviewed, sent back and corrected, with new amounts then being submitted.
New Era estimates that at least 25% of all claims, every single month, needed to be laboriously followed up, corrected and re-submitted. If New Era issued invoices before the client requested changes to claimed amounts, then often those invoices would be sent back to be reissued, or required a credit to be raised.
All this meant that a large number of invoices were not paid on time every month. And that had serious implications for business cashflow. On top of that, the valuable time of project managers was being wasted on chasing paper trails, and they were side-tracked talking to their clients about payment issues, rather than their projects.
At that time, the team at New Era thought there was no alternative to the way they and many other subcontractors were submitting progress claims, and they were unaware that a solution to all their issues was close at hand.
The only system that provides a single, trusted view for builders and subcontractors
New Era was introduced to Payapps by a long-standing client who requested they use the tool to submit their payment claims on a new project. They were open to adopting it to ensure a smooth working relationship with their client, but quickly understood the power of Payapps to streamline their payment claims process across the entire business. The New Era team were able to start using Payapps quickly with no dedicated training, finding it an intuitive and easy-to-use online tool.
Using Payapps, a single view of project payment claims and approval status is presented to both client and subcontractor.
Just try it once – you’ll love Payapps! It will streamline your business, just as it has done for ours.
Scott Darke | Director, New Era Group
This replaced disjointed, inconsistent spreadsheets prepared separately by each party. And as a project progresses, New Era project managers are each able to prepare their monthly payment claims in Payapps without needing additional assistance from other team members.
Given that New Era works on large projects, they estimated two to four hours per month were spent preparing payment claims before adopting Payapps. Now, each project payment claim is prepared and submitted in minutes. And because their client doesn’t need to wrangle figures into a new spreadsheet, Payapps removes errors because both parties are looking at exactly the same numbers.
Built-in alerts and status updates allow New Era to see exactly where each payment claim is in terms of approval, or if their client has a question that needs to be answered before approval can be granted.
In Payapps, New Era has found a tool that makes the payment claims process much simpler and faster and provides complete transparency between builder and subcontractor.
A streamlined payment claims process that works for everybody
Since adopting Payapps, New Era Group is experiencing a new level of transparency on projects where builders are also using the tool. Projects start simply with everyone seeing the same numbers. And as projects progress, monthly payment claims are easy to prepare and submit, helping save a significant amount of time.
New Era is actively encouraging their other clients to adopt Payapps, and is planning on integrating Payapps with Xero to further simplify invoicing and align project payment information with their financial management system.
