Excel vs. Vertec: Two companies in a direct comparison

Business organization with Excel or Vertec – what are the differences? Let’s take a look at three specific processes, which are central to every professional services company. These are:

• Offer tracking
• Service entry
• Invoicing

For comparison, let's consider two similar companies, each with 20 employees and 50 customers.

• Company A is the “Excel Consulting Group” and does not have a CRM or ERP solution in use. The employees maintain and process all internal processes in Excel and Word.
• Company B is “Vertec Consulting” and has digitized the most important business processes with Vertec.

Use offer tracking and follow-ups

A central Excel list forms the core of the Excel Consulting Group’s offer tracking system. It records all sent out offers with the most important details such as offer number, budget, total amount, creation date or status by the individual employees. Follow-ups are recorded in the table and then transferred individually by each employee to the Outlook task management.

With Vertec Consulting, the processes are somewhat different. With Vertec, offers can be easily created. After sending an offer, it is automatically marked as “sent”. Follow-ups are created as soon as the offer or a template is selected. The responsible employee receives reminders for certain tasks in his personal follow-ups in Vertec. All offers can be displayed in an overview and filtered according to their status. Under each customer and each project, the corresponding offers are also shown. An intuitive sales pipeline creates real added value for sales and management.

Entering services on projects

Since both consultancies work on numerous customer projects in parallel, services must be entered for each customer or project. At the Excel Consulting Group, each employee stores the services provided per project in the Outlook calendar and then transfers them manually to the general Excel list. The document contains all ongoing projects as well as the entered services of all employees and is stored on the internal server.

At Vertec Consulting, the consultants enter their services on the go via the Vertec phone app. In the office, the employees use the service entry in Vertec on their computers. In both cases, the right project and thus the right customer are selected as soon as a time is entered. The additional description text for each service is output later on the invoice. Text modules reduce the effort.

End-of-month invoicing

For Invoicing, all the information is sent to the back office. The Excel Consulting Group employs two colleagues to do this. At the end of the month, they have their hands full. Based on the service list in Excel, they transfer all the services collected to a separate Excel list for each customer. For a new customer, you have to transfer the data from the Excel address list to the Word document for the invoice. Subsequently, text modules from other invoices are transferred here by copy and paste and supplemented by the services and billing items entered from the Excel.

At Vertec Consulting, on the other hand, the employee in the back office does not spend long on invoicing. He can select the open services for each customer for the next invoicing and check them if necessary. With just one click, the invoice is created. It already contains all relevant data such as address, contact person and billing items including description texts. It can be output as a Word or PDF file and sent directly.

What exactly can I save here?

For example, if your back office takes one hour per invoice created and writes 30 invoices per month, invoicing costs you at an hourly rate of CHF 100 per month (30 x 1) x CHF 100 = CHF 3,000. That's CHF 36,000 per year. Automate this process in Vertec and the time required for follow-up checks per invoice is only 15 minutes. The invoices are created with the help of stored hourly rates and customizable templates with a click. The costs for this amount are (30 x 0.25) x CHF 100 = CHF 750 per month. That’s CHF 9,000 per year.

With Vertec, you can save CHF 27,000 per year in the invoicing process alone. Another example of 100 invoices per month can save CHF 90,000 per year.

My recommendation

As you have seen from the two examples, keeping data in a single system like Vertec offers many advantages. Team members record your services directly. This enables real-time controlling and fast and error-free invoicing. If you want to go even further, you can also automate many of the outlined processes and save even more time. If you would like to learn more about specific opportunities for process automation, let us talk to you personally about the implementation of Vertec in your company. I look forward to hearing from you.