Day 1:

I arrived at 8:30am and we proceeded directly into the conference room where the three people (Architect, Bookkeeper and Business Consultant), met with me. We discussed their business; the type of work they do, how they work as well as their general expectations when purchasing ArchiOffice.

I then took about 1 hour to go over all the modules of ArchiOffice to make sure that everyone understood it’s potential and could decide on which aspects were of highest priority.

We took a look a the financial statements their firm is used to reviewing, how this information is gathered and used. They have been using Peachtree for accounting for a number of years and are moving to QuickBooks in order to have a close relationship with ArchiOffice. They have not been totally pleased with Peachtree, so moving to QuickBooks was welcome.

Their business management consultant reviewed the material he regularly puts together from a variety of sources. His work is assembed in Excel using information from Peachtree as well as various other excel documents that people in the firm have been using to track jobs, contracts, potential jobs etc.

While most of the information comes from data that will be contained within ArchiOffice it would take multiple reports to create the same information. I think it would be wonderful to have a standard report in ArchiOffice that looks like their summary sheet that they review twice/month and will try and have this included in our next upgrade. I did mention to them that one of the features in our next upgrade is the ability for users to create their own reports.

In the afternoon, we broke up the meeting and I went to work installing our software on their server and client computers. I then began to gather their historical time cards before importing into ArchiOffice. They provided me with an Excel document with 70,000 rows representing their firms historical timecards. I will go through this to cleanse it and summarize old projects. Only active projects will have the full detail of time imported into ArchiOffice. This should trim down the file from 17,000 records to about 5,000. They are also working on providing me with detail on all historical invoices which we will also import.

I encountered a problem installing ArchiOffice on two of their computers. It turns out that they needed to have java installed. Once I did that - the software installed easily.

Total work day: 15 hours

Day 2:

The bulk of the day was spent continuing to go through all historical timecards and summarize them appropriately before importing into ArchiOffice. We also put together a list of over 90 active projects which will have their full timecard information imported.

Their lead Architect provided me with about 10 MSWord files which are their standard documents (transmittals, letters, meeting minutes…). In the evening I prepared these to include the merge fields that ArchiOffice needs to  push data into the documents when launched from ArchiOffice.

I also called on the help of one of our programmers in Australia to help with the importation of historical invoices as this work is rather tricky. I uploaded all the files to our FTP site in the evening and expect them to be returned by 8am tomorrow.

Total work day: 15 hours my time + 8 hours from our programmer in Australia

Day 3:

First thing in the morning, I picked up the files from our FTP site and put them back on the ArchiOffice server. The imported data looked very good. I then began to import the active project timecards which took about 5 hours.

After all timecards were imported, I went back through the 90+ projects to make sure that they were all active and employee billing rates were updated. Also made sure that appropriate project phases and codes were active.

I intended to start training their Administrator on how to set up the back-end of ArchiOffice - but the process for importing Contacts from Outlook is going very slowly. By the end of the day I expect all the contacts to be imported and cleaned up so that tomorrow morning I can begin Admin training and then start working with their bookkeeper to teach her how to handle invoicing, payments and export to Quickbooks.

Tonight I will modify the standard ArchiOffice Document Notebook system to mirror the system they use - then I will place the new document templates appropriately.

Total work day: 13 hours 

Day 4:

Very busy day. Started at 8:30am by taking the document templates I created in the evening and bringing them into ArchiOffice. Before this could be done, I needed to modify the standard ArchiOffice document management system and mimic something closer to what the firm had been using. Actually, the firm didn’t really use their system - but they had wonderful intentions. There was a system designed, but each project manager seemed to have their own way of storing digital documents. I’ve found this to be typical. Architects like to create organization, but don’t always follow their own rules. We discussed the “bits and bytes” concept that I strongly believe in:

Paper - and the digital data that created the print - should be filed identically. If you file a piece of paper in a hanging file - or in a 3-ring binder notebook - there is some attempt at a system, In ArchiOffice - we expect a notebook to have a series of tab dividers. This is how people know where to file or retrieve documents. The way we designed the software allows the system used for “bits” to be automatically created for the “bytes.”

 So the first thing I did was create in ArchiOffice the system that the firm and I created after analysing their existing system. Then, I placed the document templates in the appropriate place so that when a user called up a template, it would automatically store itself on their file server in the proper location (inside the correct project and the correct sub folder(s)), with a naming convention that is imposed by the Administrator of ArchiOffice. Employees will not longer be creating documents with names like “letter to bob.doc.” ArchiOffice automatically names the file and stores it away with a systematized name that makes sense - and isn’t arbitrary.

 After completed the document work, I spent time with the company’s accountant to set up ArchiOffice to integrate with their QuickBooks file. We discussed the current handling of their chart of accounts in QuickBooks and how we believe ArchiOffice should handle the entries it sends to QuickBooks for Reimbursable Expenses that appear on client invoices. We made some modifications to QuickBooks to make analysis of their income more granular moving forward.

In the afternoon, all employees attended a 2.5 hours training session that I gave them which was fairly comprehensive. We did not have time to train everyone on the sync component for their calendar, email and contacts database. However, I did train their lead architect on his computer. I also made sure everything was installed properly on each employees computer and that synching with Outlook was fully functional.

 I was able to leave around 9pm because I sent the ArchiOffice files back to our developer in Australia who was going to work through the night to import the history of all payments. Yesterday, he imported all the invoices so now we have payments that we also extracted from their accounting software and will link them to the invoices.

Total work day: 12 hours my time + 5 hours from our programmer in Australia

Day 5:

The day started at 7am when I arrived in the office to download the files that were worked on in Australia over night. All the payment transactions were properly imported and I spent about 4 hours reviewing and correcting ArchiOffice to match up properly with the Accounts Receivable from their accounting software. Part of the problem was that transactions were applied which on some occasion never had an invoice to be applied to. Other times, there were credits applied to clients - but there was no project or invoice to tie it to. I couldn’t believe how badly their accounting software was tracking invoices, payments, credits and retainers and associating them (or not), to projects and clients. After cleaning this up, I demonstrated to both the Architects in the office as well as to their accountant/bookkeeper how ArchiOffice links these all together and how valuable and simple it is to report from ArchiOffice on financial data related to projects and contacts.

I spent about 60 minutes training the bookkeeper how invoices are created (even though the principals in the firm will be generating their own project invoices), and then how she will be entering into ArchiOffice any payments, credits and retainers and how to transfer that data to QuickBooks.

In the afternoon, the project managers and I spent about 90 minutes discussing their existing system of Project Phases and Job Codes and how ArchiOffice uses these. This required making changes to the way they’ve been doing things. ArchiOffice expects project phases to match - exactly - the phases described in their client contracts. Job Codes should be descriptive of the general tasks performed during the phases. This system not only makes invoicing sensible for their client - but also easy to report back to the firm how they performed on a project and analyze projects to determine why some perform better than others.

I needed to leave at 5pm to catch a 7:30 flight out of Kansas City. I arrived at the airport about 90 minutes early to find out my flight was cancelled due to the weather. So here I am at an airport hotel for another evening.

Tomorrow I catch a 6:30am flight to Chicago for a well deserved weekend at home. It all begins again in 9 days when I head out to Client #2 in Austin, Texas.

Total work day: 9 hours + 2 hours from our programmer in Australia