Our client, Rachel Hayward, is a professional bid writer, business consultant and lead consultant for Ask the Chameleon, an awards and tender writing company. Rachel’s background includes organisational development and an exceptional HR career. Due to her extensive private and public sector bid and tender writing experience, she has successfully secured £12m in funding for Ask the Chameleon clients.Rachel believes strongly in the power of networking connections and has been nominated for a whole host of awards for her business. Ask the Chameleon has won the Small Business 100 Award and the Federation of Small Business - East Midlands Micro-Business of the Year 2019.
SME Office Support met Rachel at a networking meeting in Derby. During our conversation, she discovered that we offered bespoke automated solutions using MS Office applications. Rachel needed help creating, managing and tracking invoices quickly and efficiently. She also wanted an instant way to view how her business was performing financially.We had a 1-2-1 and discussed how we could help improve Rachel’s current finance system. Through this fact-finding exercise, we gained a better understanding of her business goals and current processes, as well as discussing key areas for improvement and her wish list.Rachel explained that time was essential; she needed to be able to continue to grow her business and to deliver a high standard of service to both existing and new clients.
Rachel recognised the current system she’d created to manage her business finances and invoices was inefficient, disjointed and time consuming. As her business was growing, she had neither the time nor skills to be able to improve the invoice process to the level she required. Her current finance and reporting system for sales, invoices and budgets was created using separate Excel and Word files.
Following our initial meeting, SME Office Support signed a Confidentiality Agreement. This enabled Rachel to be able to confidently send through her working files in Excel and Word, which she had been using to manage her business finances.
The consultation and following documents were key to helping SME Office Support gain a solid understanding of the business requirements, so that a bespoke, automated solution could be designed and developed. From this information, an Outline Specification document was created, summarising the key elements of a customised solution for Rachel’s specific business needs.
Once the system specification was agreed with Rachel, a Booking Form with T&Cs, along with a quotation including project timescales, were both signed to enable the work to commence. The project was designed using Excel with Visual Basics for Applications (VBA).
Interim deliverables were sent to Rachel to review and test throughout the system build, which included the following key features:
The following improvements were made to Rachel’s finance system:
Rachel Hayward, Ask the Chameleon