Intra Interieur is a Belgian full-service interior architecture firm based in Ghent. They offer the full service – they design beautiful interiors and do cost control and project management on behalf of their customers.
Challenges
Initially, Intra Interieur utilized Excel to manage construction budgets. But that wasn’t a good solution.
“It’s too easy to make mistakes in Excel and too hard to find out how it happened,” says Frank Martens, business owner and interior architect at Intra Interieur.
“We have designers, not accountants. But designers want to design and not spend lots of time doing cost control.”
So, they started looking for a tool that could simplify job costing.
Looking for software to replace Excel with
They spent a long time trying to find a good tool.
At first, they tried several potential solutions from the US, but neither of them worked out. The localized versions for the Belgian market didn’t exist, and the support wasn’t there either. The bugs didn’t seem to get any attention, and at one point, they even lost some of the data, but the software provider wasn’t able to recover it.
Plus, volume calculations were missing. So, they still needed to use Excel in addition to the software.
They then tried a Belgian solution specifically built for Belgian architects. But the tool felt too cumbersome and old-school. Although it could work in the cloud, it wasn’t really built for the cloud.
They wanted something easy-to-use and user-friendly. Finally, they came across Planyard.
The First Impressions of Planyard
“The difference with other tools we’ve tried is that Planyard is really easy to use,” comments Frank.
It took them several weeks to learn other tools, but they got how Planyard works in a day or two. There were no annoying popups at every step, and help was there when they needed it. So, onboarding others in the team was a lot easier.
In addition, Planyard is also available in Dutch and French. The contractors who don’t know English can still understand how to send progress reports and invoices.
Getting ready to grow with Planyard
“Planyard has given us peace of mind – we know that the budgets done in Planyard are reliable and up-to-date”, says Frank.
Another benefit is that they’ve managed to standardize processes.
“We now have the possibility to grow; we can have more people working the same way.” He adds: “It’s tough to achieve that in Excel – each person has their way of doing things.”
This means that they can hire new people and, for example, create the exact estimate as others would have done, even if they still have to learn the basics of estimating.
They are sure that Planyard will save them time, especially when collecting invoices and progress reports—verifying that data is way more accessible now.
The designers at Intra Interieur can now spend more time on what they love the most—designing beautiful interiors. The time spent on budget management and cost control has been reduced significantly.
