Key responsibilities

• Provide a full range of property-related services, including agency, planning and regeneration, building consultancy, investment, property management and valuation services.

GVA Grimley employs 1,000 fee-earning surveyors and support staff across its nine UK offices in England, Scotland and Wales. Between them, they generate approximately 18,000 client invoices each year. Until recently, this posed a significant challenge for the company's financial team.

The company was operating a largely paper-based system for administering and posting invoicing data to its central accounting system, DREAM. As a result, some invoices had to be re-keyed up to four times before they could be filed.

This created an enormous overhead for the company in terms of time and resource costs, and it also delayed the collection of fees on completed projects.

Whilst the company recognised the need for an automated and integrated system, it had been unable to identify a packaged solution that could provide the services and functionality it required.

Having successfully collaborated with GVA on the implementation of its central accounting application, Solution 7 seemed the logical choice for the development of an intranet-based electronic fee invoicing system (EFI), and the company was commissioned to undertake the project.

Today, the EFI system allows GVA to operate its entire invoicing process online including, the remote generation and posting of billing information to its central accounting application.

In addition, the system provides access and search facilities to all of its 1000 users, and has recently been enhanced to include onscreen reporting and drill-down capabilities for analysing aged-debtor information.

As a high throughput application, the EFI system has proved extremely reliable and robust, and creates virtually no overhead for support. In terms of finance, GVA estimates that the introduction and operation of web-based invoicing is now saving the company around £100,000 a year.