The Recruitment Group

Company Snapshot

Sector
Recruitment

Number of iplicit users
Full users: 10

Previous System
Sage 50

Go Live
November 2022

Website
www.therecruitment-group.co.uk

Staffing & Recruitment

Discover our finance software for recruitment agencies.

Finance Automation Webinar

"The best thing I’ve done is bring in iplicit to The Recruitment Group".

“All the finance team have said to me, at one point or another, that the best thing I’ve ever done was bringing in iplicit,” says Narinder Uppal, Finance Director of The Recruitment Group.

“They love saving time, they love investing time in the right things, which is to help our candidates.”
He found iplicit’s cloud accounting software to be “light years” ahead of the competition – turning tasks that used to take days into the work of a couple of hours.

Formed in 2017, The Recruitment Group set out to buy smaller recruitment agencies and build them as a single brand. It grew through nine acquisitions and has since simplified its structure into four businesses, providing temporary, permanent and executive staff to a host of sectors. It has ambitions to grow further and so a scalable finance solution was important to them. 

Listen to Narinder talk from his own experience about how The Recruitment Group has been able to prosper since moving to iplicit in our recent Business Growth Webinar.

 

Multi-dimensional reporting for in-depth analysis by company, division and cost centre

“I like to be able to see reports by company and then by department and then, within that, by division,” says Narinder.

“So, for example, we’ve got a branch in Loughborough and within that, we have a division called Industrial. We can understand which divisions and cost centres are making a profit and which ones are not and see overall profit and margin % contribution of our Permanent and Temporary Staff consultants.”

I like the fact I can create any reports I want, it supports us as a business massively. I use the dashboards in iplicit and if I want to create my own reports I use the Excel plug in. iplicit is probably the most flexible system I’ve ever used. It saves masses of time.”

Workflows are key for The Recruitment Group to keep control

Our payroll team use iplicit and the workflow functionality means that we can set access for specific functions within the business. It also gives us better control. We can see who has made an update – which allows us to see training required where a common mistake is being made by the team.

Group-wide visibility and intercompany management

Narinder and his team were frustrated by their old system, which could not easily show the financial picture across the group.

“With Sage, you can only open up one entity at a time,” he says.

“As a complex business, if we had an intercompany transaction, sometimes our accountants would do one side of the transaction and forget to do the other. And when we were doing a month-end reconciliation, everyone would be scratching their heads. 

“All the finance team have said to me, at one point or another, that the best thing I’ve ever done was bringing in iplicit. They love saving time, they love investing time in the right things, which is to help our candidates.”

 

Narinder Uppal, Finance Director

iStock-1392996230

“It wasn’t easy to see profit and loss by cost centre, division or department.”

Now that the Recruitment Group’s companies are using iplicit, they are all on one unified platform and contained in one view. Narinder has the flexibility to drilldown on each and filter and report on anything needed.

“The ability to run consolidated accounts at the touch of a button turns a previously daunting task, where normally a lot of data extraction and manipulation is required, into something very straightforward.”

Data migration, the ease of reporting and systems integration capability are the main reasons iplicit was selected

Some of the most important aspects for the Recruitment Group in choosing iplicit were the ease of which they could migrate their old data, the flexibility of the reporting which could be obtained from iplicit and the open API for integrating with other systems.

Having looked at Access and a few other solutions, Narinder explained that they did not want to go down a hybrid cloud approach. “We wanted a Cloud solution that works seamlessly across all different areas of our business and includes credit control and accounts and that could be integrated with our other systems such as our CRM, Matchmaker and our client billing system, PurePro.” Being able to have this integrated data means Narinder can get full visibility including reporting on margins and sales activity.

“We wanted to go on the cloud with everything. We found it very important not to get involved with things like servers, because of downtime, costs, etc.

“When we were looking at products, there were two clear competitors. And ultimately, the demos between the two products showed that iplicit was light years ahead. It is a product that I'd highly recommend.”

Timesavings - invoicing clients, bank reconciliation and at audit time

One of the biggest time savings for The Recruitment Group has come from using iplicit’s invoicing system which they use to invoice each customer weekly. They have been able to create their own layout for their invoices and attached to each invoice is the supporting information such as timesheets, which saves a lot of time.

“We used to invoice out of Sage,” says Narinder.

“Unfortunately, the information had to be manually keyed in. A team of six used to take about one and a half days to key in all those invoices. Now, with a team of four, it takes two hours to generate those invoices and send them out.

“The other big benefit will be at audit time, which was always a painful thing for us, because we get asked to hunt down things like copies of invoices.

“Now, when we have our audit, the documents are attached to each transaction in iplicit and our auditors will be given a read-only login to be able to access all the back-end documents. They’ll be able to find what they need in seconds.’”

“We use the automated bank reconciliation feature to reconcile our three bank accounts which saves a great deal of time,” says Narinder.

"A team of six used to take about one and a half days to key in all those invoices. Now, with a team of four, it takes two hours to generate those invoices and send them out."

Narinder Uppal, Finance Director

The Recruitment Group case study

Implementation and onboarding experience

Narinder says iplicit’s customer services director Sam Curtis and her team have been “very supportive”.

“We were able to do on-the-job training and our accountants were able to try iplicit in a ‘sandbox’ environment, so that if they made a mistake, it was a mistake in demo data as opposed to live data,” he says.

“We've made bespoke requests to the iplicit team and they’ve been happy to support us with that.

“With some competitors, it's always ‘Yes, we can do it, but it's on a roadmap’, or ‘Yes, we can do it but it'd be a mammoth cost’.”  iplicit were very transparent about what can be done and if it can't be done, they’d offer up potential solutions.”

iplicit is probably the most flexible system I’ve ever used. It saves masses of time."

 

Download The Recruitment Group case study

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