The story of DDJ, where numbers meet ambition and innovation  

We speak to Rob Detert Oude Weme, who works as an accountant at DDJ and whose responsibilities include planning. For Rob, being an accountant means a wide variety of work: from reviewing financial statements to relationship management with clients and the planning bit. Rob has now worked at DDJ for over 16 years and has also witnessed the company's growth. In the early years, they were with a team of eight to 10 employees, now they have grown to as many as 30 colleagues.  

"Besides a growth in staff, a merger with another accountancy firm and a move, DDJ has also been digitising over the years. Now also in the area of planning."  

Excel chaos and lots of manual work   

Planning is a broad term, what does planning mean for DDJ, accounting and consulting firm? Rob says: "As an accountancy and consultancy firm, at the end of the year you start the new planning for the next year. We check which clients have joined for the next year and which clients have left. We keep track of this information in our ERP system AFAS. We then had to update this information manually in our Excel planning. A lot of manual work like that at the end of the year."  

He continues: "Once we had gathered this information, we could start planning for the new year. Think of annual accounts and tax work. During the year, a lot of advisory meetings are added and there is a lot of shifting in the schedule. This is very laborious in Excel. Besides, you do not want everyone to be able to access the planning and accidentally shift the wrong work. Something other Excel users will recognise different versions of the planning and filters that are still on or off. Pretty error-prone, causing a lot of irritation." 

"We solved the above problems by securing the document, but this also meant that I could only edit the Excel schedule together with a colleague. We were spending a lot of time every week tracking progress, checking statuses and adjusting the schedule."   

DDJ uses AFAS. AFAS contains their customer data and the associated types of work. An accountant is linked to each client. The accountant enters the hours per work type. Based on this data, DDJ can draw up the planning for the year.  

Planning switch from Excel to vPlan   

"A few years ago, I came into contact with vPlan. The focus of vPlan at that time was on the production market, because of this vPlan could not yet provide the solution to our planning problem." says Rob.  

Fortunately for DDJ, there was plenty of development going on behind the scenes at vPlan. Useful functionalities have since been added to vPlan, including Kanban view, recurring appointments, and subtasks.  

"For us, an integration with AFAS was very important. We can achieve this with vPlan and so we switched from scheduling in Excel to vPlan." - Rob Detert Oude Weme 

How does DDJ use vPlan in combination with AFAS?  

For DDJ, AFAS is an important source of information for their planning. A link between AFAS and vPlan is therefore essential, Rob explains. "The input for our planning in vPlan comes from AFAS. The customer manager indicates in AFAS what the hours are for the standard annual work. The hours inserted are the expected hours, these are often linked to the job's budget. Once this is entered in AFAS, a ticket appears in vPlan's backlog with the information from AFAS. We then schedule the assignment."   

Rob continues, "Last year, we started setting up our new annual schedule in vPlan. Initially, it was a lot of work to schedule all assignments for an entire year. For the coming year, we have an excellent solution for this. With a link from Improvit, the standard annual work from AFAS is put directly into vPlan."   

A look at how DDJ works  

How does vPlan help DDJ make their planning transparent? And in what way is planning done? Rob tells us more about this: "As soon as assignments are planned from the backlog and linked to an accountant, all colleagues have insight into the planning. They can indicate themselves what the status of an assignment is, such as 'in progress' or 'completed'. When completed, the assignment also disappears from the task list," Rob says.  

"The status of a task can also be set to 'rescheduled'. In the Kanban view, we can clearly see which jobs need to be rescheduled. The customer manager himself puts a note in the ticket to which week the job can be moved to."   

"When I reschedule a job, I filter on the right customer manager to quickly get a clear overview of the available capacity. In addition, we do not plan per day but per week. In doing so, we also look at the week numbers when planning."   

"Every week, my colleague and I move the jobs that need to be rescheduled. At the end of the week, all colleagues update the statuses, both via the app on mobile and on desktop. Some find it more convenient to work via laptop and other colleagues find it very convenient that they can also quickly update via the app in the evening or at the weekend."  

Time savings and digitisation for accountants with vPlan  

This year, DDJ used vPlan for its planning. What this gives them and how it went? Rob explains how this process went. "To give a realistic picture, we did not initially have immediate time savings by planning in vPlan. Transferring everything to a new schedule just takes some work and time. This does not mean that it does not benefit us now and in the future. On the contrary. The integration with AFAS saves us a lot of manual work. All the jobs we used to type manually in Excel are a thing of the past. The time we now save through vPlan, we can use to deliver added value to our clients. 

In addition, our weekly planning meetings have been shortened by real-time insight into the status of orders. Communication on assignments is smooth and easy via vPlan. Also, vPlan continues to evolve, allowing us to optimise our working methods again. You do not get that advantage with Excel. Let alone the personal contact or support.   

Furthermore, it is important for us to digitise and by switching from Excel to vPlan, we are one step further in our digitisation process. I would recommend vPlan to other accountancy firms. It is more digital, modern, and user-friendly", Rob concludes.  

Rob, thank you for your time!