Quiddity saves clients thousands of hours per year by delivering efficient business services through Smartsheet

Jasmin Romic knew it was time to launch a new business when she realized that the 2.5-person finance department in her family-owned construction business was accomplishing the same volume of work as the 10-person team at a friend’s similarly sized business. She and her sister founded Quiddity initially with a mission to bring small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the same professional support and efficiency that enterprises enjoy, and then ultimately to maximize the value an organization of any size can create. 
    
“A person can start a business with very few barriers and with very little training, but they have a legal obligation to know what they don’t know or they can hire a key position and benefit only from the sum of their individual experience,” Romic says. “And they can find themselves in a situation where they’re working hard and creating little impact or value. My belief is that all businesses need professional support with broader experience, across every department, leveraging people who know what they’re doing. We’re delivering the structure that enables our clients to have financial control of their business; we’re leveraging technology and solutions, and looking for ways to support companies to build scalable operations.”

Quiddity uses Smartsheet to automate business processes, simplify daily work, reduce risk, and standardize and document the tasks of everyone at the company. The platform is crucial to the company’s mission of leveraging technology and software solutions to help both SMBs build scalable operations and larger organizations optimize for the next stage of growth. Smartsheet has shaped the way they interact with clients and operate as a business, enabling efficient performance and continual improvement. 

“A company will research and develop IP in the areas of their product offering, but as a business grows and scales, the finance department needs to grow with it, and the finance departments we run come with inbuilt IP,” Romic says. “Now that people are working from home a lot more, it’s not as relevant to need a finance team sitting inside the office. But it’s still really important to find that expertise and a solution that you can delegate a whole function to, and know that not only will the work get delivered, it will get delivered to a higher standard to meet the needs of the growing organization.”

Standardizing to enable scale and innovation 

Romic shared three of Quiddity’s biggest Smartsheet success stories at ENGAGE APAC. The first is an internal master scope document that automates the client lifecycle with workflows and dependencies that ensure every detail is addressed. Information flows from sales through onboarding, operations and delivery, and quality management; there’s even a standardized way to manage client and employee onboarding and exits.

The master scope document uses Dynamic View to share applicable information with clients in an easy-to-use format. Romic says one of the document’s most important functions is to enable consistent performance and efficient transfer of information, even when team members transition to other roles. 

“The impact that it’s having on our organization — the level of visibility and control versus the administrative cost of running it — is absolutely phenomenal,” Romic says. “We couple what we’re doing in Smartsheet, the automated and centralized task lists, the reminders and the control features that Smartsheet have inbuilt, together with our ticketing system, and then you have complete visibility on what’s happening in the organization. People’s task lists are all automated but that doesn’t take away from their ability to be completely creative and change or improve the tasks that make up their role. If anything, it gives them more time to be creative, because they’re not bogged down with the administrative burden of meetings to allocate work. As a company, we get to retain the workflows for each role as top performers may inevitably move on. Most beneficial is the ability to instantly see the cost of every task and to be able to weigh up whether the benefit outweighs the cost. This solution is about removing filler work, making role transitions seamless, optimizing the impact that each role has, and being smart about the way we contain administration costs as a business grows.”

Solving financial challenges before they become bad debts 

Quiddity uses Smartsheet as the foundation for a debtor management solution for a client that was dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in bad debts. The client’s legacy software systems limited their oversight and management of customer account issues, making it difficult to take action and solve problems before they reached the stage of collections and default. The Quiddity team recognized that a clear system of alerts and communications could make account management proactive rather than reactive. To work together efficiently with the client, they needed a solution that could bring communication onto one platform, and Smartsheet had the agility and user-friendly features that fit the bill.

“It’s not efficient to send escalation emails to a busy manager when a customer account is overdue and at risk; it’s challenging for anyone to prioritize a high volume of communication in a flooded inbox,” Romic says. “There was no visibility to track all the outgoing communication or accountability to respond to it. Using Smartsheet, we can escalate an overdue account by assigning the customer account line which includes the history to the right person, and everyone can see what the next step is. If your list is blank, you’ve done everything that you need to do; if your list has something in it, then it’s actionable.”

Quiddity built a Smartsheet solution that enables managers from multiple departments to view and act on debtor data early. It improves internal collaboration and promotes a systemized and strategic approach to collections and communicating with customers to prevent potential credit problems. The real-time data updates in the Smartsheet solution help to respond to customers quickly and see how collections are progressing.

“We were able to develop the solution as we went along, adding potential improvements as they presented and as processes evolved because of the flexible nature of Smartsheet,” Romic says. “Compare that to bringing in developers to build a solution. How long would it take to develop and maintain it? We need the ability to adapt to opportunities that we identify as we’re rolling out a solution. It’s about continually leveraging the information that’s available to improve how we operate, how much more we can deliver, how much faster we can deliver it, and it’s all measurable.”

Romic says the debtor management solution has motivated the collection team and transformed the customer’s collection results. Today only a small percentage of debts are rolling over from month to month and bad debts are tracking to be reduced by over 80% from previous years.

Integrating platforms to power a startup’s business 

Using Smartsheet, Quiddity has developed an end-to-end operations solution for a startup whose business model involves leasing short-term assets across several states. The client had no budget for custom software, so Quiddity worked with them to create a Smartsheet solution that connects the finance and operations teams to streamline contractor payment, invoicing, lease and revenue tracking, contractor scheduling, and asset scheduling. 

The solution integrates the client’s Pipedrive CRM with Smartsheet via the Zapier app connector, feeding data into a Smartsheet that automates workflows from step to step to facilitate the asset leasing and installation process. 

Installation appointments and contractor availability are managed through the Smartsheet calendar feature. Contractors receive job information on their mobile devices, complete with photos of the assets, Google address validation, conditional quality checklists, and electronic signatures are managed through Appsheet and integrated with Smartsheet. Quiddity was able to create the solution quickly and without the delays and added costs of hiring an app developer to do it for them. The solution meets the needs of all departments, including Finance.

“Within a few minutes you have the ability to create a webform and to share it with a client or end user and start collecting information efficiently; this has a positive impact on reputation because you are operating innovatively, and the benefits to an organization are far-reaching,” Romic says. 

“When you can leverage technology like this and you have the know-how to utilize it to solve everyday problems, to improve the efficiency of your client’s business and to make it so simple, easy and seamless for them that they become reliant on it, you almost become synonymous with the solution.”

Robust processes that run without a leader’s vigilance

With Smartsheet, Quiddity can move its business forward with less wasted time, duplicative effort, or fragmented communications. The automated processes can be replicated and tailored to new needs for consistent delivery of service. 

Romic says the real value of the solution is that it enables the leadership team to focus on more strategic goals and remain excited about the company’s direction. For most leaders, being able to step away with confidence and a sense of security is vital for an organization’s growth.

For more information about this story, please see our case study.