How Allen Pyke Associates cut invoicing time by 50% and brought 30 years of project data into one system

For 30 years, Allen Pyke Associates has delivered landscape architecture across the residential sector, with work spanning landscape assessment, planning-stage design and construction-stage delivery.

In 2019, the practice made a significant change, moving from private ownership to an employee-owned business. It brought a different attitude to how the practice approached its work, and it’s around this same period that Allen Pyke Associates introduced Total Synergy.

Before then, the team was relying on a patchwork of tools that didn’t talk to each other. Sage handled the accounts. A separate, standalone piece of software recorded timesheets. Fee proposals were written manually using a Word template. Resourcing and programming were tracked on printed sheets, filled in by hand.

“They all worked, but they weren’t connected.” – James Hyde, Director, Allen Pyke Associates

As the practice grew across two studios, James and the team needed a clearer picture of where time was being spent, how projects were tracking against fees, and what work was coming next. Colleagues researching options at the time came across the platform and recognised it could replace the timesheet software, support project management, and connect directly with how the practice wrote and structured its fee proposals.

Bringing Everything Onto One System

Around 200 live and active projects had to be brought across onto Total Synergy, alongside the practice’s historical project data.

To manage the move smoothly, Allen Pyke Associates ran their old systems alongside Total Synergy for a period while the transition took place. James recalls the process as well organised on both sides.

“The team at Synergy were great at helping us and guiding us through that process, and have always been on hand since.” – James Hyde

The Total Synergy team ran a series of training sessions to help the practice get familiar with the software, and any early hiccups were reviewed and resolved quickly. That support hasn’t dropped off since go-live. James still knows he can pick up the phone with a question, and the relationship has continued as the practice has looked to get more from the platform over time.

Three Goals, Three Wins

Allen Pyke Associates set out to improve three specific things when they adopted Total Synergy:

• How fee proposals were written
• How time was recorded
• How clients were invoiced

The practice has seen significant improvement across all three.

The clearest number sits within invoicing. What used to be a 22-day process is now down to 10 to 12 days on a good month, and invoicing time has been cut by roughly 50%. Fee proposals are made from consistent templates rather than being rebuilt from scratch each time, and time recorded against specific fee items now flows straight through into invoicing rather than needing to be manually reconciled.

The practice has also seen around a 10% increase in productivity, a meaningful number for a small team where every hour matters.

“We’ve seen about a 10% increase in productivity on the administration side of things.” – James Hyde

Scope Changes, Handled on the Spot

One of the areas James points to as making the biggest daily difference is how the practice now handles scope changes mid-project. Landscape architecture work often runs to tight timeframes, and a client call asking for an urgent change is common.

Previously, tracking additional work outside the original scope meant a manual process to capture and bill for it later. Now, James can take the call, confirm the change is possible but sits outside the agreed scope, and jump straight into Total Synergy to flag a new item against the project while he’s still on the phone. It gives the practice a clear, immediate record of the time and fees involved, and a clean way to report back to the client on what’s needed and why.

Visibility From the Top Down

As a director overseeing multiple live projects, James can dip into any one of them and see the full financial picture in seconds, budgets, transactions and invoicing status, without having to chase anyone for an update. Project runners have that same visibility available to them on their own desktop, which keeps everyone working from the same information.

That visibility extends into how the practice plans ahead too, feeding into billing projections and project scheduling as the team looks to get more proactive about where the business is heading.

For James, the real shift isn’t that any single task got faster. It’s that the team now has a clear picture of how projects are performing while they’re still in progress, rather than finding out after the fact.

“If we were still doing things the way we were doing them five years ago, it’d be a nightmare.” – James Hyde

Advice to Other Landscape Practices

James is candid that switching systems is never going to land at a convenient time. And for Allen Pyke Associates, the alternative isn’t one they’d choose to go back to.

“It can feel like quite a big change. But we the benefits we got from making that change massively outweigh the time and effort it took.” – James Hyde