Designer Group is Ireland’s leading innovative and sustainable provider of mechanical, electrical and instrumentation engineering solutions. Established in 1992, the company now has a turnover of €310 million and specialises in offering full design and installation services, from conception through to completion.
The business’ operations span not just across Ireland, but the UK, Europe, and Africa, covering everything from small scale works to major projects exceeding €50 million.
Given the company’s growth and increasing number of subcontractors employed, Designer Group was keen to streamline its payment claims process.
The manual approach in use meant the payment claim process was challenging and time-consuming, so Designer Group sought software that not only enhanced accuracy and reduced wasted time, but that was intuitive to use.
The Challenges
- Manual, spreadsheet-based payment claims were inefficient, difficult to track, audit and manage across individual inboxes.
- Risk of missed assessments due to lost emails, inconsistent formats and varied formulas.
- Time-consuming process made training new staff challenging and diverted surveyors from higher-value site work.
Like many businesses, one of the biggest challenges Designer Group faced was avoiding the risks typically associated with traditional methods – trawling inboxes for lost emails, inaccurate spreadsheets, receipt of assorted payment claim formats and input of different formulas by project members. This meant payment assessments could easily be missed and training new employees to handle payment claims was a regular, arduous task.
The Solution
- Implemented Payapps to automate payment claim workflows, centralise information, and enable real-time collaboration with subcontractors.
- Standardised digital claim templates, improving accuracy and eliminating inconsistent formats and manual spreadsheet processing.
- Introduced dashboards, automated reminders, and ERP integration to ensure timely, compliant assessments and full audit visibility.
To streamline its processing of payment claims, Designer Group turned to Payapps’ innovative automated software. The company can now monitor all payment claims and the solution enables quick and trusted communication between Designer Group finance and commercial departments, and its subcontractors. Having one source of available information that everyone working on a project can easily access, strengthens collaboration between Designer Group and its supply chain, and removes the need to deal with time-consuming payment-related enquiries.
Commenting on their supply chain’s adoption of Payapps for submitting claims, Danny Preston, Commercial Manager at Designer Group, said, “Our subcontractors quickly got used to submitting payment claims through Payapps and really like the system now. Rather than constantly ringing and emailing a busy quantity surveyor or our accounts team, they can look at Payapps to see if and when the claim has been assessed. They can see what money they’re going to get on the due date for payment.”
This is a key benefit for Designer Group – the shared platform means subcontractors are kept informed for cashflow purposes about what payments will be made and when. It’s not only essential for fair payments, but for keeping teams on site and the projects moving along.
Danny explained how standardisation of claim format has further improved efficiencies, for both Designer Group and those submitting payment claims: “For any new project or subcontractor, we’re able to set the template for how payment claims are formatted, and that can be as minimal or as detailed as we like. The subcontractor just logs into Payapps every month – on their phone, tablet or laptop – and applies percentages or values against each line item. As a result of these standardised formats, Payapps software allows quantity surveyors to view and manage payment claims so efficiently now that it has removed the need for us to have a project manager as the go-to person for those claims.”
The Results
- Streamlined payment claims process, significantly improving tracking, auditability, and overall administrative efficiency.
- Saved several hours per quantity surveyor each month, freeing time for site work, valuations, and CVR preparation.
- Improved compliance with automated workflows, ensuring assessments issued within the 21-day statutory timeframe.
- Enhanced supply chain transparency, giving subcontractors real-time visibility of claim status and payment dates.
- Reduced risk of human error through dashboards, reminders, and fully auditable payment claim data.
Easy support access and payment claim administration
While managing payment claims, each quantity surveyor can work directly with Payapps to resolve any queries. For new starters at Designer Group, particularly young trainees and graduates who are more accustomed to Teams chats and WhatsApp conversations than speaking over the telephone, Payapps offers an in-app chat for quick and easy communication with Payapps’ Support Team.
Indeed, it’s imperative in the construction industry that any administrative task is swiftly and reliably completed to allow time for more meaningful activity.
Danny revealed the huge difference Payapps had made in the four years the company had been using it: “Before we had Payapps, payment claims from our supply chain were done the traditional way, through spreadsheets. These were sent to individual quantity surveyors and contract managers’ email addresses. It was quite inefficient – quite difficult to track, audit, and manage.
“Payapps has made everything so much more streamlined. The time saved is hugely appreciated by the whole team – each month, if you can shave a couple of hours off the time it takes each quantity surveyor to assess claims, they can spend that time walking the site, measuring works, claiming variations, preparing their CVR’s. There are so many other things that they could spend those two or three hours working on.”
Reminders and workflows ensures compliance
As well as offering time-savings, Designer Group’s quantity surveyors have access to informative dashboards that count down the days left to provide an assessment and distribute reminders. An automated payment claim process ensures the risk of human error is reduced, improving accuracy and giving much better control.
Niall Newman, Senior Quantity Surveyor at Designer Group explained, “Everyone involved has more confidence and a heightened peace of mind that all payment claims are correct, and that assessments are timely and compliant with the Construction Contracts Act.
“From a management perspective, the dashboards are excellent for looking at payment claim status within and across projects. We also receive an email report from Payapps every couple of months which gives really good data for seeing trends across our subcontractors and supply chains. This is important not only for our commercial teams but for the finance department too. In fact we’ve recently integrated Payapps with our EVision ERP construction management system from Eque2, so the finance team has better visibility of the payment claim process with no need to re-key information from one system to the other.”
Why Designer Group recommends Payapps software
“We certainly recommend Payapps – it’s worth having from a cost-benefit perspective and from the quantity surveying point of view, it’s just far more efficient. From a contractual compliance point of view, trying to make sure we had ticked all the right boxes in a dispute situation was hard to manage when relying on humans, spreadsheets, and individual inboxes.
“Now, Payapps puts us in a very good position for tracking dates if the worst happens – the payment claim date, number of days to assess the application and payment due date are all auditable. Payapps automates the workflows and all relevant information is in one place and clear to see. So in an adjudication situation, we wouldn’t fall at the first hurdle of not having issued a payment assessment within the 21 days… that just wouldn’t happen now. We’re glad to have that comfort.”
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