To start off this blog, I want to tell you where JobBag came from.  It will help you understand our approach to our software, services and what we want for your business.

When we started this company back in 1992, we wanted to create great software that helped creative businesses be as profitable as possible.  Computing in 1992 was very different to now – there were still Mac Plus computers with 9-inch screens although 13-inch RGB monitors on Mac IIsi computers were all the rage, networking was struggling into existence in small offices, laser printers cost a small fortune (as opposed to a large fortune a year or two earlier) and Aldus Pagemaker ruled the layout world.

For many creative businesses, just getting computerised was a significant financial challenge, but one that they had to tackle to stay competitive. Email was something you did internally and the Internet didn’t exist.

JobBag (or Job Bag as it was then) came out of an idea for reducing the manual effort required to keep track of everything that went into getting a job done.  A “job bag” was a huge folder, sealed on 3 sides.  Everything that related to the job was put into the job bag – the brief, concept drawings, the estimate for the client, quotes from suppliers, copy, revisions, notes and anything else in between.  The job bag literally went from person to person as they worked on the job and each person was responsible for writing up information like their timesheets and other costs on the front of the job bag.  When the job was completed the job bag would go to the accounts person, who would total up all the things that had been done on the job and raise an invoice to the client.

With a manual system like that, there was loads of room for improvement…!  Job Bag (JobBag) was born.

From day one, JobBag was different.  For starters, it worked on a Mac and had a graphic user interface.  It didn’t look like an accounting program, it was designed for those who actually did the work.

The biggest thing that JobBag did was it brought everything together in one place – no longer did you have to chase around for the job bag to see what was happening.  It was possible to see what had happened on the job, the total value of all time and what had been billed to the client.  We could get out a job listing that summarised everything so we could see what was happening on all the jobs.

The impact was profound – it was easier to manage the job and we increased the amount that we were billing to the client.  We could see where we had generated value and we billed the client for it.  We also could see where the client had asked us to do work that was outside the estimate, and this was billed to them as “Author’s Corrections”.  That had a huge impact as we were actually billing the client for most (if not all) of our time that we had invested in their job.  It was revolutionary – being paid for all the work you did!  It also made us more profitable.

Being free from the hassle of just tracking the job meant that there was time to look at how things were going in the business.  Account service people could run the job, we needed to be able to run the company.  We needed to see how the business was performing, to see which clients hadn’t paid, how much we owed our suppliers, how much money we had in the bank and if we really were making a profit.  We integrated accounting functionality into JobBag so that what happened on the job costing side automatically flowed – instantly – into the accounting side of JobBag.  The right hand knew what the left hand was doing…

Now we had a truly integrated system – that worked on a Mac… Given there were more than a few Windows computers out there, we started the task of re-writing JobBag to work on both Mac and Windows computers.  At the time it was a fairly unique concept, to have Mac and Windows computers accessing the same database at the same time.   We launched that version in 1997 and JobBag has been cross platform ever since.

Around that time, a client asked me to have coffee.  He said “David, I don’t need you to tell me how to use JobBag, I need you to tell me how to run my business better”. 

There was a challenge.  For years we had seen ourselves as software developers, and even though I had been the Finance Director for an advertising agency, we didn’t recognise that we knew a lot about where the challenges were for our clients, even though we talked about them day-in/day-out when we implemented and trained our clients… 

We started talking about capacity.  One of our smartest clients kept asking me for more information about his business and to prepare reports that gave him his Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  That started us thinking about the way that we could present information to our users about what was happening in their business, and what their business was capable of achieving. 

The KPI Model that we use in JobBag was born and this is the fundamental basis of every implementation that we do.  It is the yardstick that tells you what your business is capable of achieving, with the people and resources at your disposal.  The KPI Model shows you:

·      what your employees really cost per hour,

·      what your charge rates need to be so that you make the profit you want,

·      what your billing capacity is,

·      what happens to your billings and profit when you business doesn’t perform to your expectations. 

It’s the wake-up call that everyone who runs a creative business needs to have.

So here’s the deal – we develop JobBag to help you run your creative business better than you can now.  We want your team to be in control of the job so that it is easier to come in “on time, on brief and on budget”.  We want all parts of your team – creative, project management, studio, production, web, interactive and whomever else – to be in touch, informed and know what is expected of them.  We want you to know what the capacity of your business is, what your employees are actually doing, and where the leaks are.  We want the results that you see on your financial statements to be confirmation of what you know, not an unpleasant surprise.

We want you to be profitable so you are free to produce insanely creative, wonderful work, which is why you started this business in the first place!  That is our mission.

If you are not in that place then you need to talk to us.  Feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or things you would like to see covered in this blog. Back