“I’m keen on anything I can use to reduce time on administrative tasks and spend more time on engineering. I went with Synergy for engineering business management because it wrapped everything together.”
James Turner | Director – Structural Engineer, J Turner Design (UK)
See all storiesJames Turner — J Turner Design
More time for engineering
“I’m keen on anything I can use to reduce time on administrative tasks and spend more time on engineering.
“I went with Synergy for engineering business management because it wrapped everything together. Before, the project accounting side was quite disjointed – I had a package to do invoices and basic bookkeeping with a tenuous link to my banking system. These were isolated from proposals and shared documents. All the information was spread out through the various packages and I couldn’t get them to communicate. Now, it’s all in one place.”
Role/s in the business
James has run his own limited company since 2016, but said he could easily be a sole trader. As well as owning the responsibility of all administrative tasks, James is the consultant structural engineer of the practice.
Quick and easy
“I don’t have to login to three different systems, or manually update a spreadsheet, so proposals, timesheets and invoices all match from the outset.”
The QBO connection
“Synergy integrates with QuickBooks Online, which I am migrating to for my accounting. I don’t want to be duplicating work. I can create invoices in one location and send them to the accounting software automatically, then marked paid and send the payments back to Synergy.”
Simple file sharing
“[Clients] tend to have one email address for everything, so things can go missing. Now, they know it’s in the project portal. And because the files and packages of work get bigger, I can just send links rather than huge files.”
Why we need Synergy
“Synergy lets me look at how I am performing across the business. It’s not enough just to tag the project ‘residential’, ‘commercial’, ‘domestic’ – I need to drill down and see my actual costs against my budget.
“Maybe a job didn’t take longer than I’d planned because it was residential, but because I was building a retaining wall from scratch rather than repairing. Synergy helps me see a pattern in the scope of my work.”
Core Synergy features used by James
Time saved as a result
“Without technology, I couldn’t do my job. It helps me punch above my weight.”