Document processing in Aberdeen and the north east

What this involves

Invoices, delivery notes, timesheets and forms read automatically and filed where they belong, with a person checking the edge cases. For a business in Aberdeen and the north east that usually starts with a short conversation about what is actually going wrong, rather than a list of products. We look at what you already have, what is worth keeping and what is quietly costing you money, then put a plan in writing before anyone touches anything.

Nothing here depends on you understanding the technical detail. We explain the options in plain English, tell you which one we would choose and why, and leave you with something your team can actually use on a Monday morning. If a cheaper approach would do the job, we will say so rather than quietly selling you the bigger one.

Working in Aberdeen and the north east

• ▸Remote support the same hour, wherever you are in the north east
• ▸Used to the security and compliance expectations of the energy supply chain
• ▸On site scheduled in blocks so a single visit clears a list, rather than a call out for each job

On site by arrangement, planned in advance. Whichever way the work happens, you deal with the same small team throughout rather than being handed between departments, and you keep our direct number.

Why Aberdeen and the north east businesses ask us for this

Most people who ring us are not shopping around for technology. They have a problem that has become impossible to ignore: something falls over every few weeks, a job that should take minutes eats an afternoon, or a customer has started asking questions nobody can answer. The technology is downstream of that. What they want is for the thing to stop being a problem.

That is the lens we work through. Businesses around Aberdeen and the north east tend to come to us after an arrangement that grew by accident, where each piece made sense on its own and the whole thing now nobody quite understands. Unpicking that carefully is usually worth more than any single product, and it is why we start by asking what your week actually looks like rather than what software you have.

We work with businesses of every size, from a one van trade to an eighty seat contact centre, and the approach does not change. Small enough that you deal with people who know your setup, experienced enough to have seen the failure modes before.

How the work runs

Every job follows the same five steps, whether it is an afternoon of work or a project that runs for months. You always know which step you are on.

1. 1

   A short scoping call

   We start with a conversation, not a proposal. Twenty minutes on the phone is usually enough to work out whether this is the right piece of work for you at all. We ask what is actually going wrong, who it affects and what you have already tried, because the fix for a problem is rarely the thing people first ask for. If document processing is not what you need, we would rather tell you at this point than three weeks in.

2. 2

   A written plan and one fixed price

   You get the scope in writing, in plain English, with one number at the bottom. It sets out what is included, what is not, roughly how long it takes and what we need from you. Nothing starts until you have read it and agreed. The number does not drift later unless you ask for something that was not in the plan, and if that happens we tell you the cost before we do the work rather than after.

3. 3

   The work, scheduled around your week

   We book the work around how your business actually runs. Anything disruptive is done outside your busiest hours where that is possible, and for Aberdeen and the north east businesses that usually means agreeing the timing in advance rather than turning up. You get told when we are starting, when we are finished and what changed, and there is always a way back if something does not behave.

4. 4

   Handover you can actually use

   A system nobody understands is a system nobody uses. We hand over with your team, not at them, and leave documentation written for the person who has to run this next Tuesday rather than for another engineer. Where it helps we record a short walkthrough so a new starter can pick it up in six months without ringing us.

5. 5

   Aftercare, and an honest answer

   We stay reachable afterwards. If something we did stops working, that is on us and we fix it. If you want to change direction later, you own everything: the accounts, the domains, the data and the licences are all in your name, so you are never stuck with us because leaving is painful.

What tends to go wrong

A few patterns come up again and again, and they are worth naming because most of them are cheaper to prevent than to repair.

• ▸Nobody owns it. The person who set it up has left, the documentation went with them, and everyone is quietly hoping it keeps running.
• ▸It was sized for the business three years ago. It has been patched around ever since instead of being revisited.
• ▸The backup has never been tested. Having one and knowing it restores are two very different things.
• ▸Everyone shares one login. It is convenient right up until someone leaves or an insurer asks about it.
• ▸The supplier is unreachable when it matters, so small faults sit for weeks and turn into big ones.

None of this needs a lecture. It needs someone to look at it properly once, tell you which parts are genuinely urgent and which can wait, and then deal with them in a sensible order. That is most of what we do.

Questions