Align Reduces Billing Time and Increases Billables with Journyx

According to Jerry Davidson, a consultant at Align, the company was using a homegrown system for tracking both employees’ time and expenses.

This older system met the basic needs of collecting time and expense information; but its user experience, the age of the system, and integration issues with Dynamics NAV combined to create additional problems.

“The GUI wasn’t all that intuitive…the expenses [GUI] were very painful and time-consuming for the users,” says Davidson. “The reporting wasn’t all that varied or useful.” The system also had limited error-checking, which made it difficult to collect accurate time data.

Davidson identified another shortcoming: the existing system did not integrate very well with their accounting platform, Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Their system synced data one way into NAV, “but it was a bit more of a manual process, so any time there were any issues with [the sync], the back-out process [relied on] one person who knew how to do it,” says Davidson.

Any changes to configurations (such as rules) were not easy to make, because they were hard-coded into the system.  “It was written in old code, on old hardware…by people who have left the company,” says Davidson. “This presented a support issue.”

Even though their system had the basic functionality needed at Align, its issues all added up to extra time spent processing timesheets. As a professional services organization, billing clients in a timely manner is important for Align – and it was taking five to 10 business days to get their billing processed and out the door.

The Align team faced the classic “build or buy” decision when it came to a time and expense tracking solution that did everything they needed, including integrate properly with Dynamics NAV. “Can we get another product that does time, expense, and some scheduling,” says Davidson, “or are we going to take the old product and re-tailor that?”

Ultimately, Journyx’s integration with Dynamics NAV and easier-to-use interface, combined with its strong and experienced support team, led to the decision to purchase Journyx.

Align utilized Journyx for Dynamics NAV, which creates a complete bi-directional integration between Journyx and NAV. With the integration built by Journyx’s Professional Services team, Align’s resources, job codes and job tasks are now quickly transferred from NAV into Journyx – all at the click of a button. This includes all job code assignments and job task availability, so users entering their time into Journyx will only see the job codes available to them, and only the job tasks available to the selected job code will be available. This ensures more reliable and accurate time entry data coming from the users.

Furthermore, an appropriate approval plan is auto-created for each user according to their manager setting in NAV, so timesheets and expenses are approved by the right manager in the right way.

Once users are finished entering all of their time into Journyx, at the click of another button, all of the manager-approved time records are automatically sent back into the appropriate location in NAV – saving Align precious time processing timesheets and expenses.

“The [Journyx Professional Services] team was extremely helpful, patient, and professional,” says Davidson. “Some Align business processes were a little different than most professional service firms, but the Journyx team was able to adapt and suggest ideas for an effective implementation.”

By using Journyx, Align reduced its processing time for client billing by 40% or more. “Less time is spent getting through the month-end cycle…what used to take five to 10 business days now takes three to seven business days,” says Davidson. Align was also able to identify missed billing opportunities, since they were able to track time more accurately. “We feared there may have been missed hours captured in the old system. Now that we’ve moved to [Journyx], we are more confident that hours are not being missed,” says Davidson. “There was also the potential of reimbursable expenses that should have been recouped with the customer that in the past may have fallen through, and now that’s less likely to happen.”

Overall, Align has been very happy using Journyx. “After years of using a home-grown time and expense system, we selected Journyx to help us provide a more reliable and improved experience to our Professionals,” says Davidson. “Journyx integrated with our accounting package successfully and provided more reporting capabilities for users and managers alike.”