Irish Signs
Meet Dermot Howard
Dermot Howard is the owner manager of two digital printing businesses, namely Irish Signs and Advanced Window Films that provide bespoke solutions to their commercial and residential clients.
Irish Signs has offices in Dublin and Carlow and clients nationwide. Over their eleven years in business, their professional team that have developed a wealth of knowledge and expertise in signage production and digital print management. One of their key services is providing full shop fitouts, printing and installation to global brands here in Ireland.
Complementing the works carried out by Irish Signs, Dermot’s second company Advanced Window Films instal window film in a wide range of commercial, retail, government, military, health care, and educational establishments throughout Ireland.
European Window Culture for Ireland
The guiding vision of Dermot is to offer his commercial clients a European window culture that highlights their clients’ offices and retail space. With the advent of a working from home culture, the supply of privacy film has become increasingly popular. When privacy film is applied to the glass on windows or doors, it blocks out and controls heat and UV from the sun and provide privacy from prying eyes as you enjoy your home or work from home.
With our team on the road constantly it’s important they know what job they have next and that they can easily access the full details of the job when they are on the move. We decided to change our online accounting package so we could link our CRM package with it and cut out a lot of the admin time. We now find it much easier to manage enquiries, track jobs, manage staff and timesheets and invoicing.
Commercial Applications
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Solar Control
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Cyber Security Signal Defence
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Blast Mitigation
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Safety Film
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Anti Blast
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Cyber Security Signal Defence
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Privacy Film
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Anti Vandal
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Antri Grafitti
Domestic Applications
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Frosted Windows
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Heat Control
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Privacy Film
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Glare Control
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Safety Film
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Security Film
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Decorative Film
Managing Teams Is Easier With Xero
With clients from an extensive range of multinational firms operating throughout Ireland Dermot has to manage teams of fitters on the road. When you harness the power of applications that work with your online accounting package managing teams is so much easier.
His account manager here at Lalor O’Shea McQuillan suggested that he would benefit greatly
by making the move to Xero and using an app called Tradify.
Here's what Dermot had to say...
“The main reason for migrating to Xero was because we use a CRM application called Tradeify and it integrates perfectly with Xero. Tradify is a job management application specifically designed for trades people.
With our team on the road constantly it’s important they know what job they have next and that they can see the full details of the job. We find linking Tradify and our online accounting package with Xero cuts out a lot of admin time. It makes it easier to manage enquiries, track jobs, manage staff and timesheets and invoicing.
When we are quoting for a job, it’s great to be able to upload photos and specs so that we can generate a quote inside of Tradify. That quote is automatically sent to Xero and when payment is submitted, Xero will provide suggestions to help match the bank payment to the invoice.
There is a two-way sync feature between Tradify and Xero which means all invoices, payments and credit notes are automatically updated and we can track cash flow in real-time. We didn’t have this function with our previous online accounting package.
With shared login between us and our accounts manager at Lalor O’Shea McQuillan, our accountant can look at our Xero dashboard to generate reports, insights and to prepare our bi-monthly tax returns and annual returns.
We alsof find the Hubdoc function is very useful because all invoices are stored digitally. With the old package we had to keep a copy of the actual invoice in a folder, whereas the new digital storage saves on printing costs and storage.
The Bank Feed feature makes reconciliation really easy. It finds invoices and suggests matches so that is less time consuming.
With the help of our account manager at Lalor O’Shea McQuillan we do bi-monthly VAT returns and the integration with bank feeds simplifies the process of getting Tax Codes. What is particularly helpful is that if we need to edit any entry – all we have to do is to click on a hyperlink. This feature wasn’t available in the cloud accounting system we used previously.
Reducing the time spent doing common tasks such as quotes, invoices and payments and to keep on top of these while on the move or on a job is extremely beneficial for us. When it comes to receipts, all we have to do is to take pictures of receipts or bills to pay with our smartphones and they are automatically uploaded to our cloud account.”
With little experience of cloud accounting, Dermot invested fully in learning how to use Xero for the day to day running of his financial processes.