About Taxmag

Founded in 1997 to provide security tagging to retailers, Taxmag UK have expanded and now provide CCTV and access control installation and services across the UK. Over the years, the business has become increasingly high-tech. Camera systems which were originally used for security are now also providing business growth opportunities for Taxmag’s clients, such as video analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) which provide heat mapping for shops and the identify VIP customers via facial recognition.

With an ever-growing business and increasingly complex client requirements, having internal systems that could save time and deal with detailed, individual client jobs, as well as provide management information had become more crucial.

“I can honestly say I’ve now actually got everything I want in the logical order that we run the business and it’s all in one place. And I can log in from anywhere.”- Glynn Gordon, MD, Taxmag

The Business Challenge: “Our Systems Just Weren’t Joined Up”

“I’ve been looking at software for a long time. The business had evolved with a combination of excel spreadsheets, paperwork and various software. I felt that we had all these fragmented islands,” commented Glynn Gordon, Taxmag’s Founder and Managing Director.

“Before we met Workhorse, we had finally narrowed it down to two or three different software vendors but they all had something missing, “noted Gordon. It was then that he approached Workhorse with a list of all of their unique business requirements. “Workhorse came in to do a demo and we literally started to build the system tab by tab, right there.”

Like many businesses, processes had grown organically, creating multiple data entry inputs in their internal process. The sales team would do something on the customer drive and then quote on excel, then that would be turned into a pdf. When they got the job, they would fill out another form and send it to the office, where it would be re-keyed into the finance package, information was copied and pasted from the quotes to create the purchase orders, then you had the service managers’ software for managing installations and servicing. Everything was disjointed and it was impossible to see everything from a management information perspective. There was the potential to save a lot of time each day.

The Solution: Workhorse Order Management

Enquiries – Prospects – Customers – Quoting – Purchase Orders – Product Catalogue

Multiple Price Lists – Integrations – Xero – Mailchimp – Field Job Sheet App

Tailored to Maxtag’s Own Processes

“We’ve built every field that is meaningful to us and any other business could do the same,” says Gordon. The new CRM at the heart of the system has been tailored to the business’ process needs providing greater detail than other systems they researched. What’s more, quotes, invoices and client job information can now be raised from one central system, enabling the business to be able to track the stage of every client job. The system has made a significant difference to the level of admin and manual keying the sales and admin teams are required to do.

Simple things have smoothed out processes. Now, instead of just one customer record and address, they are able to pick from a list all customer sites, a considerable benefit when quoting for multiple-site retailers and creating job sheets. What might seem like a small piece of functionality now means that just with a click, any team member can quickly add head office and site addresses to generate quotes, purchase orders or job sheets rather than typing them manually for each client. It’s a considerable time-saver.

Pricing Catalogues & Quoting

Quoting has been made more efficient with a comprehensive product catalogue that handles multiple price lists. Sales people no longer have to waste time searching for the right part and correct price list for the client. All products and pricing are now held on one central database, also eliminating pricing and margin errors.

Improved Forecasting & Reporting

Historically, quotes were raised manually in Microsoft Office and provided no oversight over individual customers, quotes or orders placed or in pipeline. Now with Workhorse Order Management, Gordon can now track everything happening in the business in one place, as well as who is responsible for each installation. The quoting module now also operates as the business pipeline forecast, eliminating the need for separate, manual forecasts on excel.

Typically, each order has multiple installations, the new order management system now enables Taxmag to provide their clients with a transparent plan of action for all their jobs. Rather than simply saying to the customer, ‘we’ve got your order’, Taxmag is able to provide the client with information on who is doing which fix, or installation and plan it into the schedule automatically from the quote builder, providing the client with dates for when their order is going to complete.

Field Management Made Easy

With 15 permanent staff and expanding to 40 or so with additional engineers in the field during busy periods, Tagmax needed a system to track installations and fixes and make it easy for them to know which jobs they are working on as well as to do the admin.

With Workhorse, Tagmax’s engineers can easily log in and see the calendar and their allocated job sheets. With the field job sheet form filler app, the team will be able to fill out job sheets on their phone when completed, get customer sign-off with a signature and push the information back into Workhorse, providing an up-to-the-minute record of which are still in progress, or are completed and should be invoiced.

Now, It’s Just Streamlined

The benefits of the order management system have affected all areas of the business. Visibility over the sales order pipeline has improved, and any team member can see where any enquiry, quote or order is in the sales order pipeline. When customers or invoices are created and the record is saved, it is automatically pushed to the finance software, Xero, so you don’t have to spend time re-creating it.

Where it was previously a challenge to keep track of all the customer service and maintenance agreements, Workhorse alerts the account management team about which clients need appointments and all client installations, fixes, maintenance and services are all linked to the central Workhorse calendar.

The system is changing the business for the better from end-to-end, “Comparison wise, I think, I think there isn’t a comparison. It’s definitely really good value for money for what you’re getting, it’s really, it’s a kind of a business ecosystem,” added Gordon.

How we helped DG Glass

DG Glass needed a way to monitor their pipeline and generate quotes quickly. Workhorse has given the business the capability to speed up quoting and track pipeline activity in one simple system.