Trust Impact is a UK-based consultancy that helps link impact to the purpose for its range of charity and social impact clients.
The Challenge
Founded only three years ago, Trust Impact gained rapid momentum which started to push on the company’s operational limits. While spreadsheets and Quickbooks were enough to keep track of everything in the early stages, it became challenging to manage it all centrally as the company grew.
“Trust Impact is a very lean organization. We don’t have offices, we’re all online in different parts of the world. Essentially, it relies on something central to coordinate everything – a central point of truth. That’s what we were looking for.” – Matt Stevenson Dodd, Managing Director
Evaluation
Initially, Trust Impact started to look for project management software to help them manage the processes from start to finish. “We wanted to see how much we were charging, how on a budget our projects were, and record the time allocated against each project,” Stevenson Dodd explains.
It was also essential to find a solution that enabled them to track project costs and budgets, to ensure their financial resources were used as efficiently as possible.
After trialing multiple solutions – including Wrike, monday.com, and Price&Cost – they realized that different platforms offered parts of the functionalities they needed, but not all of them in one place.
“I started thinking that we’ll be ending up with lots of different software, all trying to do different things that we should really try and bring together instead,” said Stevenson Dodd.
Why Scoro?
After a considered and iterative process, the company found Scoro. Despite being initially skeptical, Scoro’s end-to-end capabilities were something that appealed to Trust Impact, including:
- A real-time overview of the entire business in one place
- Interlinked CRM and sales
- Advanced project management and tracking
- Time and resource management
- Budgeting and cost management
- Billing and overall process automation
“When I read that’s what you did, I thought, how could you possibly do that well across the whole piece, but it does really work. It’s the absolute beauty of Scoro,” Stevenson Dodd describes.
“Our ability to just track the whole journey from the moment you say ‘Hello’, moving from quotes right through to new projects and all the automation that goes along with that, to me that is the best thing.” – Matt Stevenson Dodd, Managing Director
Business Impact
“As we’ve gone on, a lot of good things have come out of the switch. Firstly, our Onboarding Expert was so flexible in trying to meet our needs and help find suitable solutions for us. I was very much impressed by that,” said Stevenson Dodd. “You can imagine that you sign up and then “Good luck, off you go!”, but with Scoro, it felt really interactive.”
Real-Time Overview And Transparency
Ever since moving their business fully online, Trust Impact and its 30 users have experienced the benefits of having no geographical boundaries and expanding their business on a global scale.
With the company’s workforce mainly made of external consultants located around the world, Scoro has helped Trust Impact to create a digital workspace where all essential data about projects and tasks is always available, no matter where people are working from.
“This means everything is not just coming through me as one point of contact. The consultants can keep track of their own projects and their performance, see how much time has been logged and how much is left. It’s all really clear and easily manageable.” – Matt Stevenson Dodd, Managing Director
What’s more, Scoro has given Trust Impact a complete overview of their business, while not missing out on important details.
“At the start of every day, I have two browser tabs set to open up automatically – Scoro and Quickbooks. And I always go straight to the dashboard to check in on things – it’s central to what we’re doing.” – Matt Stevenson Dodd, Managing Director
Stevenson Dodd continues: “I love the dashboard. We got all the things about cost, revenue, the average time it takes to convert, conversion rates, all sorts of things that are great for me looking at the business and where we are going.”
Project Budget
Managing their projects in Scoro has helped Trust Impact gain a detailed understanding of their project progress and performance in real time. “To be able to see how people put in their hours, complete their tasks, record what they’re doing – it has really helped us understand how we use our resources and their availability,” Matt explains the benefits. “We especially like the budget part of the project view to keep track of where we stand financially.”
Working with charities where money is often scarce, Scoro has helped Trust Impact be really transparent with their resources and clients. “We spend a lot of our time moving our resources around, making sure we don’t charge the charities more money than necessary. Being able to use that money to do more work, or give it back to the client has been really helpful to us,” Matt describes the process.
Workflow Automation
Ever since implementing Scoro, automating processes and eliminating time-consuming manual routines has been a big focus point. From replacing manual contract creation with dynamic PDF templates to automated invoicing, Scoro has enabled Trust Impact to replace many time-consuming manual routines with streamlined processes that take only a click to complete.
“You can have a contract ready to send to DocuSign and then to the client at the press of a button. I was really impressed with that. The whole process would normally take us a couple of hours to complete.”
Another game changer has been automating various workflows with Zapier.
When it comes to the future, Trust Impact has really started to see the benefit of putting Scoro in the center of its day-to-day operations. Matt concludes: “The more projects and things we work on, the less I feel the need to keep everything in my head and control it. Having a central system like Scoro is really essential for that to work.”
About Scoro
Scoro is an award-winning end-to-end work management software loved by agencies, consultancies, and professional service firms around the world. With Scoro, you can manage your entire workflow all in one place, from the first hello to the final invoice.