May 19, 2020
For many businesses it’s been a fraught and worrying few months as Coronavirus forced many to stop trading and put projects on hold. Fortunately, Cambridge Software - like many software companies - have been able to come through what we hope is the worst of the pandemic without too much disruption.
Customers and regular readers of this blog will know that we went to a fully virtual working model in June 2018. This helped us enormously with the current situation. The lockdown in the UK - first imposed on 23rd March - meant that we didn’t need to change the way that we worked professionally. Our regular team meetings still took place and we already had solid tools for billing and time tracking that fit working from home requirements.
On the personal side, one of our team had childcare issues when the schools closed and is currently doing some home-schooling for their children. We’ve found all of our customers have been understanding in the limited availability we’ve sometimes needed to show and we’re grateful for that.
The government’s furlough scheme has been a fantastic safety-net for us. We’ve only needed to furlough one member of our team. They were on a long-term contract which due to the lockdown was suspended. It’s been great to see the efficient way in which the government managed to get the money into our bank account to offset those costs.
Many software houses have reported an upward trend in sales and Cambridge Software have proved no different. Indeed we took on a number of new clients during the past few months which was great. We were also able to help a number of other companies who wanted to get their own helpful projects off-the-ground through various innovation funding opportunities.
Before the peek of enquiries and new customers came to us we even considered putting in our own bid for application development but due to concerns we had about our capacity we shelved that idea.
Importantly, our flagship product RealtimeCRM has also continued to attract new users throughout the lockdown. As an easy-to-configure CRM system designed to work with remote teams we can only assume it’s been a good hand-in-glove fit for the challenges that many people are facing.
We very much look forward to everyone getting back to business as normal and we remain here to help if we can so feel free to get in touch.