How we were born

The founders, in addition to other businesses, had been operating a contract hire firm with up to 1,400 contractors on-hired at any one time. There were about 60 internal staff and many handwritten documents, folders of invoices and payments received in the mail. There were also Business Development Managers (BDM’s) that had rules as to margins to charge amongst other things, as well as, legal compliance clauses embodied in contracts with the client and the on-hired employee.

We had a need to audit these contracts at one time and found that clauses in the contracts had often been altered by the BDM, resulting in either our business not making profit, and/or unnecessarily exposing us to legal and financial risk. Paper had clogged our business, and staff were not coping. Our business rules were not being followed. We vowed to find the solution once and for all.

This is when we came up with the idea of online contracting, the application we now call PACT: Principal Agreement & Contract Tracking. We engaged developers to code a system where we could email contracts that the clients could approve, which would automatically trigger contracts to be sent to the employee to be hired. The BDM would initially complete an online form. To progress to the next stage, the information entered would have to agree with coded business rules and have to pass credit control that had client histories. Without abiding by these rules, it would not reach the contracts manager. If the BDM wanted an exception it was highlighted. If the exception was approved, the contract would then be sent to the client. Once accepted, it was recorded in our system, the information was passed to invoicing and to payroll online. In the year of operation it saved us $1M approximately in gross margin, and some overhead. We were then hooked on the benefits of a paperless office and online software and we have been developing these ever since.

Fast forward a few years, we decided to outsource our back office functions. To do that effectively we needed to map our processes in order to minimize/eliminate confusion. In doing so, we changed paper-based into online, paperless processes we developed, such as our Purchase Order System. This meant we actually had less to be outsourced as we were achieving the savings in the application. It made the execution of our business processes virtually mistake free. In mapping those processes we decided to make it flexible to handle any business and to bring it all together in our ultimate invention to date.

It’s tough for SMBs. Business owners aren’t on salaries that just happen every month.

Guess What?