Complementing JPYʼs entry into the world of SaaS (Software as a Service) with MRX is another service called Abacus - a time recording system like no other. Abacus is further down the line than MRX in that it already has one commercial customer - a busy architectural practice in SW London.

The product was developed by JVolution, the recently acquired development arm of JPY and born out of JVolutionʼs need to control costs - professional staff and clients.

Abacus is aimed at small to medium size consultancies who sell their professional services as time to their clients. Any organisation that invoices their clients on the amount of time they spend on a task needs Abacus. Abacus is a very flexible management tool that can be structured to fit any project hierarchy within your organisation. Its primary aim is to capture and report time and expenses in the easiest way possible without the need for the organisation to adopt a new, foreign and rigid project structure.

With Abacus everything is recorded. This is not so that we can keep an eye on our professional staff, but to protect them if any invoices are questioned. And it works perfectly. Our clients can see were their money has been spent. They can also see the amount of work we have put into a project, but have not charged for. This always goes down well.

Back in 2001 JVolution were trying to review their project development strategy and it became clear that they were losing income from project scope "creep". In their day to day work JVolution developers were in constant communication with clients as projects moved from phase to phase. The focus of staff was to provide the client with the best solution for their needs. Changes to the initial project were not always going back to the account manager - especially small changes. The problem got worse after a project had ended. Clients were contacting development staff directly for additional minor changes which were not being picked up by accounts. This caused problems:

• Work was being done without charge
• Projects were taking longer than expected
• New clients were not getting the focus they required

Like many document systems today, abacus uses a tree-view navigation structure to locate tasks within an organisation via a folder hierarchical structure. Thus a project can be added to Abacus as a folder with various information including who has overall authority for the project and the estimated overall time (or start/end dates) for the project. This folder can, in turn, hold other folders relating to sub-projects assigned to other members of the organisation with their time estimates etc, and so on. As the developers time is allocated to sub projects higher level folders can see whether these lower folders have exceeded their budgets.

Abacus also helps with invoicing and managing developer rates. Historical information is not affected with rate changes. Numerous reporting tools help the accounts department in creating invoices and making sure all time and expenses are correctly billed for.

Contact us to discuss you requirements and arrange a demonstration.