This guest post is from Mark Lind, Systems Analyst at CCI Systems. CCI Systems uses Quickbase for project management, as well as managing accounts receivable information.
Here at CCI Systems, we work with many large cable service providers, such as Comcast and Charter to name a few. We offer a plethora of services to our clients, ranging from fielding work and mapping out as-builts, to designing new cable systems within our Engineering Services department. This means we have many projects operating all at once, so it is essential we stay on top of every aspect of them from start to finish.
In addition to using Quickbase for managing projects, we also utilize it for managing our accounts receivables. We have an invoice collection tracking app built, where we have open invoices scraped from our ERP system through a self-maintained integration. From there, our accounts receivable (A/R) team will track their communication with the customer, create internal notes about the invoice for other A/R members to view, and help to see which invoices appear to be lagging so they can take appropriate actions to help close them out within reason.
Without Quickbase, employees would have to email this information back and forth. This would open up many more potential single points of failure, and reduce visibility into each invoice’s communication details.
We provide our A/R teams and senior level managers with a multitude of dashboard reports and charts that display things like aging, special interest invoices, and past due invoices to help make monitoring these open invoices easier. We primarily use the app as a way for the A/R teams to track their specific business unit’s invoices, though we do have senior level viewers from each business unit who have limited access to the higher level data contained within it. All the invoicing data for our Engineering Services business unit’s data from this app is then seamlessly pushed into our project management applications with Quickbase.
For us, this makes it simpler to maintain who should have access to each application, as all the business unit’s project managers and supervisors are already assigned at least one role within these project management apps. When people only have access to the information they truly need, their work becomes much simpler. At the same time, we can be confident in our data security and privacy concerns.
This dashboard provides a lot of valuable analytics for our team. The project management team can see when they will be paid for each assigned project, helping them keep a better pulse on how quickly their customers are paying us for the work their teams are doing. This also helps them to be more engaged with the A/R teams, and offers them the opportunity to step in with our customer contacts to help resolve any outstanding balances within a timely fashion or help clarify any gray areas.
Quickbase helps fill in the gaps our legacy systems have so our A/R and operations management teams can stay focused on their work ahead. By filling these gaps and keeping data accessible, we can make more informed decisions, instead of wasting time seeking out data from different systems.
I'm Mark, one of the systems analysts here at CCI Systems. I'm located in Wisconsin, where you can have 65 degrees one day, then experience below zero wind chills the following day!
