About the company
- Cosmonauts & Kings
- Industry: Consulting & Communications
- Employees: 50
- Location: Germany
Before and after Scoro
Cosmonauts & Kings used four separate tools to manage their business, which led to operational inefficiencies. Their tool stack included:
- Pipedrive for sales
- Harvest for time tracking and forecasting time
- Monday.com for project management
- Easy Bill for creating quotes and invoices
“We lacked a reliable source for all our business and financial data. The disconnect between internal costs, external providers, and revenues made many issues invisible and unreportable.”
After Izabela, the new COO, joined the company, she recognized that scattered data was the source of many issues. Without a unified system, it was nearly impossible to improve efficiency or get a complete picture of projects and financials. So, she wanted to make changes immediately.
“I chose Scoro because I had used it successfully at my previous company and was impressed with its features. I appreciate how it provides a complete overview and reporting tools, covering everything from the pipeline and quotes to task management and invoicing, all of which are easy to access and track.”
1. Situation before: Low billable utilization
Employees of Cosmonauts & Kings tracked their time already before Scoro. However, they were not able to distinguish between billable and non-billable hours. Therefore, they did not know if they were hitting their billable utilization targets or not.
After they started monitoring this metric in Scoro, they realized their billable utilization was far lower than targeted. And they were spending too much time in meetings.
“After recognizing the billability issue, we noticed we were holding too many meetings, some of which were unnecessary and could be conducted differently.”
Result with Scoro: Billable utilization is rising
Now, with Scoro, they can understand and manage their billable utilization much better.
Each task is tagged with a relevant billable or non-billable activity type, such as ‘event management’, ‘consulting’, or ‘internal work’. As a result, when people log time against the tasks, their time is automatically categorized as billable or non-billable and compiled into a report.
“This granularity in tracking wasn’t something we had before. Scoro’s detailed reporting and tracking capabilities have given us a clear view of our billability and project profitability. This insight is crucial for making smart decisions, like changing staff levels to match project needs.”
Thanks to these insights, Cosmonauts & Kings was able to review and reduce non-billable activities. They are now aiming to keep their billable utilization at 70% or higher.
“Scoro inspired us to streamline our meetings and improve how we share info. We cut our meetings from weekly to bi-weekly without dropping productivity, saving us hours and boosting efficiency.”
2. Situation before: Overservicing clients
Cosmonauts & Kings was also struggling with overservicing. It was hard to compare estimated vs actual project budgets because quoting, time tracking, invoicing, and cost management were done in separate systems.
“Our challenge with overservicing was that we often invoiced too late or went over budget because we didn’t have a clear overview of what had been billed and what was still pending.”
In order to invoice for the project, time records had to be exported from Harvest and imported into their billing software. It was an error-prone process – if anyone changed their time log, it was difficult to track the changes and be sure the time was billed for.
They faced similar struggles with external cost tracking. It was difficult to monitor whether all the necessary expenses were passed through to the clients or not.
Result with Scoro: Control over external costs and improved margins
Now, all that data lives in Scoro, and project budgets can be monitored in real-time. Whenever anyone logs time against the project, adds a new purchase invoice, or issues an invoice to the client, it’s instantly reflected in the project budget.
“Now, thanks to Scoro, we can clearly see how each external provider or additional hour affects our profitability. Another major challenge was managing numerous spreadsheets to track key business KPIs. Now, Scoro automates these reports.”
To gain better control and visibility over external costs, Cosmonauts & Kings started using Purchase Orders in Scoro. Once the cost is confirmed with the freelancer, a PO is raised.
This helps track the committed cost and account for it in the budget before the purchase invoice is received from the supplier. This means there are no last-minute surprises that can derail the project’s profitability.
