Britcon - CATS deploy Construction Suite across the group

Britcon (Scunthorpe) Limited, part of The Hunt Group of companies, is one of Lincolnshire's largest construction companies, dealing in building and civil engineering, plus fabrication of steel structures for educational, retail, leisure and government projects.

A new system was needed by Britcon, to assist the financial and project managers within the group. The new system had to deal with the ins and outs of sub-contractors, applications for payment, deduction of relevant CIS tax, as well as retentions and contract discounts. For its customers, the system had to provide certified valuations and periodic invoicing, allowing for retentions and discounts.

The job costing for its projects has to record the budget job costs, direct material costs, time worked by employee type and costed accordingly, sub-contract labour and material costs, apportionment of overheads so that tight control can be maintained and reported upon.

All of the above and more has been implemented in Britcon's new system by CATS. A detailed set of job costing analysis codes control the costing structure by activity (one method of analysing job costs), whether costs relate to the preliminary costs of the project set up, the costs of services, build or civil costs, sub contract costs through to the finalisation and hand over costs. Each of these major activities has been split again into tasks performed, enabling the management to drill through committed costs to purchase orders and actual invoiced costs; providing immediate comparisons of budgeted costs to actual and committed, with the ability to get back to original invoice and purchase order entries.

The solution CATS provided for Britcon was a smooth transition from Sage Line 100, exporting all the original data held in Sage. Our professionally qualified staff ensured all control accounts were correctly reconciled and opening balances broken down by individual invoice and unmatched entries.

The overall installation has included setting up the parent company, The Hunt Group Ltd, as well as other companies within the group, Specialist Surfacing Ltd and ColdMac Ltd. The latter two being similar installations to Britcon.

Support from CATS is provided via telephone support, as well as remote access to each users workstation when authorised...all of which is included in the standard annual support and maintenance fee.