Welcome to our November newsletter!
This month we continue with the second part of the in-depth discussion that we had with one of the leading voices in the bilabl community, Rizwan Khan. He is the Managing Director of Acclime Vietnam which many will already know as a leading professional services firm. Read the first part here
Here at bilabl we are thrilled to share this journey of growth and execution with Rizwan’s talented team. Their trust and partnership has been a key driver to a number of system developments that many others in the community also love.
In Part One Rizwan walked us through the problems solved (billing and time sheet management), the very positive onboarding and training experience and the benefits of data visualization from the system analytics. So, now let’s move onto cost savings. During a period of revenue growth, it can be easy to overlook the very powerful impact that cost savings can have on profitability. Rizwan gave a very specific breakdown of where these had been encountered using bilabl:
“Our biggest saving comes from the time that was otherwise used in timesheet management, cross checking the billing and other administrative matters. We now have less staff who are managing these activities and even for the service teams, they have more time to spend on the actual billable (not bilabl) hours instead of the non-chargeable admin tasks.”
For any business, cash is king. For a rapidly growing business it can be the difference between long-term sustainability (and success) and a great idea that failed due to illiquidity. Here is what Rizwan had to say about the impact that bilabl had for cash management at Acclime Vietnam:
“We have a significant improvement in our cash cycle, with the visibility of data, we could monitor the performance in real-time, we could see the trends and take appropriate actions where needed.”
But what about tweaks to the core functionality? Not all firms have the same workflows, right? Once again, bilabl was able to adapt to the demands of Rizwan:
“Customization is one of the most important parts of any software solution and bilabl is no exception. Even though it met most of our requirements, we needed some additional features due to our unique business model. The team at bilabl always responded on time and implemented the features that we requested, and all that at a reasonable price tag.”
Cost is a very basic metric for performance. Once bilabl is installed the analytics deliver a clear insight into productivity, and this is where resource allocation becomes very powerful. Let’s see what Rizwan had to say about their experience:
“Overall, we have improved our productivity. In particular, we managed to divert our resources and time that was otherwise used on admin tasks towards more productive tasks and that resulted in more chargeable hours. Also, bilabl helped us to manage the whole practice within one portal and manual processing has been reduce to almost zero.”
From there our conversation moved to the value. We have always strived to deliver the price to functionality of bilabl far above that of the market. But it is more important to hear what Rizwan thinks as a long term of the system:
“I believe bilabl offers a very high value for money, especially for companies where multiple services are provided to hundreds of clients. bilabl not only collects the data at one place but also reduces the admin tasks and provide a visualization of data that enable us to take action, in almost real time, as and when needed.”
After all of this insight, we wrapped up with a simple question about what his favourite feature in the bilabl system was. This tends to generate a very wide set of responses within the community, according to pain points, user roles and so forth. For Rizwan, as a business leader, it is perhaps unsurprising that it is derived from the transparency of the analytics engine that sits in the heart of bilabl:
“Reporting is perhaps my most favourite feature as it gives the visibility of all aspects of my practice including timesheet, billing and other important info. Now, I can track the performance of the whole company down to a single team member. Same goes for the billing to each client, where we could track the billing and collection history.”