ADE Professional Solutions has been working on the professional services market since 2004, providing a wide range of services to Russian and foreign companies.
- Industry: Auditing and Consulting.
- Company size: 50 employees.
- Country: Russia
- Revenue in 2021: RUR 114 mln.
Digitalization of our business is an integral part of our development. The implementation of Timetta, at the first stage, is aimed at obtaining accurate data on the actual labor costs for projects. We use the time data in management reporting to calculate indicators, including profitability.
Within a month we were able to configure and implement Timetta and start using it in full. Convenient report designer, ability to fine tune the approval process, prompt technical support — all this allowed us to take into account our wishes and make the launch of the system comfortable for our staff.
We recommend Timetta as a convenient and functional cloud tool with concise interface and good technical support».
Eugene Rudakov
Partner ADE Professional Solutions
Our company ADE Professional Solutions has been around since 2004. The main service is preparation of financial statements to international standards for business. We have a variety of customers, from small companies to large well-known businesses. For example, we prepared financial statements in preparation for RusHydro's IPO. As we developed, we started to provide services in transfer pricing and tax consulting. We also have major clients in these areas, both Russian and foreign. In particular, until February 2022 ADE Professional Solutions serviced the Volvo brand. Our largest Russian client is OOO Irkutsk Oil Company.
We also have financial audit and system integration divisions.
In the field of system integration, we do not have a lot of projects, but our clients are quite significant, for example, we support the consolidation of PJSC Federal Grid Company — Rosseti, PJSC Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, JSC Gloria Jeans.
We structure our team similarly to the Big Four companies. That is, we have professional employees: from consultant to director, there are four partners in different areas. The partners used to have up to 60 people reporting to them. But now, after the restructuring, there are about 50 people. There is also a small staff of administrative staff. This IT, marketing, sales and so on. The roles of staff are classic. These are auditors, consultants, analysts and so on.
Financial reporting projects take from 2 weeks to 1 month, implementation projects take 1 year, sometimes longer. Transactional pricing projects can take from a week to a couple of months. Interaction with clients is based on the classical scheme. This is the conclusion of the contract, work planning and execution. If we talk about IT-projects, everything is a bit more complicated there. There we use both cascade methodology and flexible approaches to project management.
We estimate projects at hourly rates for each specialist. We enter into two types of contracts: time-and-material, or at fixed cost. In first case we estimate project cost for our clients, make commercial offer where we describe problem. If fixed cost, in principle, everything is the same, but consider project budget in details. We also tell our client how long each stage of work will take, and calculate the average workload of employees by grade. The resulting number of hours of each specialist is multiplied by his rate.
For each project, we calculate the profitability, as well as the total labor costs. We compare how many of the planned number of hours were used. We also estimate the utilization of employees. Basically, we calculate profitability on large demonstration projects. We also calculate the profitability of the direction. We do not analyze all the projects yet, because it is not required. But we are getting there, little by little. The only thing is that we don't have enough Timetta capabilities for everything.
We don't analyze all our projects with Timetta for several reasons. First, it's the lack of knowledge that gets in the way. It takes time to master all the functions of the platform, which we don't have at the moment. And we can't understand everything at once. We also don't have a CFO, so one of our partners does all the management accounting. Second, we don't want to upload all of our corporate information to Timetta. We need to keep our data within the company. Third, our accounting department is not integrated into the service. So we don't calculate all the numbers through Timetta, and we don't know if we are going to do it at all. The main reason for the weak use of the platform is that we are quite clear about our business, calculating profitability on projects and comparing margins. Since ADE Professional Solutions has been in business since 2004, we have accumulated huge amounts of data. And it would take too long to take them all into account.
If a project takes more time than planned, and we understand that it is becoming unprofitable, we act on a single plan. We decide either to sign an additional contract with the client, or as a last resort, to close the project with minimal damage to quality.
We implemented Timetta in September 2019. Prior to that, we were using Retain, which was very handy for visually assigning employees to projects. This was the issue we were particularly concerned about at the time. It was important to assign people to projects. Timetta cannot solve this problem at the level that Retain once did. Retain remained unsurpassed when it came to visualizing project resource planning. Then we switched to Excel timesheets. As the amount of work grew, it became clear that this solution did not suit our needs. After all, we had to analyze large amounts of data. So we opted for Timetta.
We use Timetta to monitor our staff's overall workload, so we know that everyone is doing their job. It is a great solution for keeping track of the utilization of remote employees, especially if they are contractors. The service also helps pay contractors. They also fill out timesheets and then bill us at the end of the reporting period. If we use time-and-materials contracts, from Timetta we get the data for the invoices that we send to the client. Sometimes we upload project statistics for the client. Sometimes they ask to see the time costs.
Before Timetta, we also considered many foreign counterparts. For example, cloud automation systems. We also tried global solutions to automate all aspects of the business. We simply didn't have enough tasks for their broad functionality. But Timetta attracted us by its lower cost. The fact that the service was developed in Russia, and that there was Russian-speaking help with the implementation, was also a nice bribe. We liked the simple interface of your service and the minimum of unnecessary functions. This meant a simple and quick implementation. At that time we only needed to collect data in timesheets.
It only took us 2 weeks to implement Timetta. There was a little resistance from the team. But it was insignificant. We wrote a routine for working with Timetta and encountered some misunderstanding on the part of the staff. Then we changed the rules a bit, and everything went fine.
At the top level, we use Timetta in the following way. Partners start projects, employees turn in timesheets. We have several dozen reports set up that we use. For example, we count employee work hours, project profitability, and staff overtime, which we then count as days off.
The effect of implementing Timetta is rather indirect. First, employee discipline has improved. Now they don't waste their time. That indirectly improves the profitability of projects. We can also compare labor costs for similar projects based on the data we already have in the system. This helps calculate budgets for new projects. It has become much more convenient to collect information for employee payments and data for clients. Thanks to this we are sure that everything is in order with finances.