Syntax planbar

Syntax GmbH, an IT system house from Oldenburg/Germany, has been developing corporate annual planning software especially for small and medium-sized companies since 1980 and complements the business side with hardware, IT services, and training.

Challenges

What goals do you want to achieve as an entrepreneur?

The basis of every successful company should be, in addition to the idea and the product, a solid and forward-looking cost calculation.

But small and medium-sized companies in particular hardly have any meaningful information to make such a calculation. Thus, many service and craft businesses ask themselves the question: How high should my individual billing rate actually be? What is the range of rates, and what is most common on the market?

The hourly billing rate, the value that an entrepreneur charges for one hour of work, is one of the essential variables in any business. Its calculation must include all costs, such as hourly wages, ancillary costs, material consumption, tools, non-productive time, rent, electricity, and so on, plus a profit mark-up. A costly and cumbersome way to calculate this is to maintain your own spreadsheets on a regular basis.

However, if the hourly billing rate is not known, it is like flying blind as an entrepreneur.

What would happen if ...?

For entrepreneurial decisions, it is best to spend some time planning to determine which basics have to be fulfilled in order to move to the next step. This can be extremely helpful for offers, bank discussions, new acquisitions, hiring new employees, and similar changes.

Solutions

The planning software planbar, developed in Delphi, is an ideal supplement to existing industry software.

Delphi was chosen as the development environment because a small team of developers can use it to develop significantly more efficiently than in a C++ or Java environment, for example. The user interface is thus always kept up to date with the current style specifications of the corporate world, in order to provide users with intuitive operation. The use of prefabricated and self-created components offers extreme advantages over other tools with little effort.

The software planbar has been developed in Delphi since 1997 and evolved from a predecessor product written in C++. planbar is being used successfully throughout Germany by a wide variety of customers in the area of corporate annual planning.

Why Delphi?

The trick of developing with Delphi is that everything is developed super fast. We can care much more about the content of the application than about the visual and technical implementation.

Andre Freese, Managing Director and Software Developer at Syntax GmbH

Results

With planbar the company not only developed its software in Delphi, it promotes Delphi to all professional developers working on their own service offers. Each professional developer and each software system house should have its costs and charge rates defined, important parameters to have in view. One focus is on companies that offer services, such as craft makers, care services, cleaning services, or consultants, with a highlight of the possibility to simulate business processes and their impact on profit.