The latest news from Meantime IT

Software developer Meantime IT has been awarded a £150,000 contract to develop a bespoke application that will track and control all stages of the Will Writing Company’s business processes.

The Will Writing Company, which is based in Nottingham, is one of the the UK’s largest providers of will writing and estate planning services to both the general public and high street building societies including Newcastle and Leeds and many IFAs. The company appointed Meantime to design and implement a comprehensive customer contact, performance tracking and reporting tool that will provide detailed management information about all aspects of each individual transaction, from referral to completion.

And the Will Writing Company’s managing director Tom Gormanly is predicting that as well as saving substantially in licence fees on the company’s current system, two full-time members of staff will be re-deployed from manual administration processes to fee-earning and business development work, forecasting a significant return on the initial investment within two years of the system being in operation.

“It’s absolutely business critical for us that we are able to track and control every aspect of customer contact from an initial cold introduction right through to final customer satisfaction and fulfilment, and all the stages the client goes through in the process,” says Gormanly. “And it’s essential that we are then able to obtain and analyse detailed management information about all aspects of that transaction – how it related to the performance of individuals within our company, as well our introducers and individuals within their business.”

The system that Meantime has been appointed to develop will automate all processes for the Will Writing Company, from lead generation and management to commission payments right through to case closure.

Steve Parker is Meantime’s lead developer. He explains: “It’s an incredibly powerful application that will enable everyone involved in each stage of the estates planning process to utilise the system to manage their work and track progress. Because the company’s business processes are built into the software, all the data is in one place with the result that, at any time, Tom and his team can have instant access to realtime reports about every area of the business.”

Every individual involved with the business process, from third-party referrers in organisations such as Newcastle or Leeds through to Will Writing Company consultants and external underwriters, will have access to the system and will update individual cases in real time. As a result, every aspect of each individual case will be held in one central location. The in-built reporting tools will then automate everything from commission rates and payments, lead generation and follow-up, contact management right through to case closure.”

“Because all that information is held on one central system, it’s a very simple step to finance management and reporting,” Steve continues. “This gives the Will Writing Company reporting and management tools that can deliver reports on anything from cash-flow forecasts to the performance of individual referrers, enabling the company to pinpoint within seconds areas of their business that are most profitable, or those which are under-performing.”

Will Writing Company MD Tom Gormanly is confident that the system designed by Meantime will not only streamline business processes, but also enable the company to grow. “We’ve been using our existing platform for six years, but it’s very limited in terms of user access and sharing of information, and particularly in terms of management and financial reporting.

“These processes are currently done outside the core platform, and there’s a huge amount of human intervention involved for a simple report. The specification that Meantime provided us with was incredibly impressive, as they completely understood our needs and requirements and have devised a system that will do everything we need it to do, and also let us build on in the future.

“Buying off-the-shelf for us just wasn’t an option – any CRM package would have required such a huge amount of customisation that the end cost would probably have been more than creating our own. And the added advantage of commissioning the software is that the licence will belong to us, meaning significant savings on software licensing fees.”