Farrells Improves Financial Transparency to Support Better Project Decisions

Farrells uses Milient's Project Flow, previously known as Rapport3.

Farrells is an internationally recognised architectural practice with a long-standing reputation for delivering high-quality architecture, masterplanning and urban design. Prior to adopting Project Flow, their internal processes were becoming increasingly fragmented, with financial and project information stored across spreadsheets and multiple systems.

Associate Partner Lauren Sandy explains that this disjointed setup made it difficult for teams to quickly understand the financial status of projects. Job runners, in particular, lacked clear and up-to-date visibility into project performance, which limited their confidence and slowed decision-making.

Farrells needed a single, reliable system that could bring project and financial data together, improve accessibility, and support both day-to-day delivery and longer-term planning.

Choosing Milient

Farrells adopted Project Flow in 2017, implementing the core Project Costing module alongside the HR module. The ability to consolidate information into a single platform and gain real-time insight into both project- and practice-level finances was a key driver.

Reflecting on the impact, Lauren said, “Project Flow enabled us to see very quickly where a project stands financially and where the office stands financially. We could clearly see what we would be billing in the next few months at any one time. That feature in particular became critical over the previous year due to the pandemic and the subsequently tighter budgets.”

The visibility provided by Project Flow became especially important during periods of uncertainty, enabling Farrells to plan with greater confidence.

Benefits of Milient

Project Flow’s flexibility and customisation capabilities have allowed Farrells to tailor the system to their specific workflows and bidding processes.

As Lauren explains: “We were able to adjust the software and put our own fields in there so that we could search for previous projects when bidding for new projects. For example, we could search for residential projects with a specific number of units, or projects in specific locations. So we now have an easily accessible database for current and previous projects, which helps with bidding.”

This searchable project database has strengthened knowledge sharing across the practice and improved efficiency when responding to new opportunities.

Supporting Remote Working

When the pandemic accelerated the shift to remote working, Project Flow played a crucial role in maintaining communication and operational clarity.

“Communication isn’t easy when working remotely,” Lauren said, “So seeing financial information at the touch of a button is great.”

They explained that without Project Flow, projects and processes would likely have taken significantly longer, and it would have been far more difficult to understand future income and make informed resourcing decisions.

Integration and Support

Farrells have also spoken highly of the customer service and ongoing support provided by the Milient team.

“It’s brilliant. Really personable and friendly. Milient is really quick to react to things and get things done as quickly as possible. Liam is always there when we need him - he is really friendly and always there to chat. Having the dedicated support team available really helps. We have been talking to the team for years, so they know how our business works and how we need Project Flow to work for us, so they help us to keep it specific to our business needs.”

The practice also values the continued development of the platform:

“The fact that Milient continues to improve the software with updates is brilliant. They are great at responding to queries and requests from clients and implementing improvements that benefit everyone. It’s great to see them working on the next generation of software while improving the existing software at the same time, at no extra cost to us.”

Final Thoughts

Farrells continues to maximise the value of Project Flow, using it as a central hub for financial clarity, project insight and informed decision-making. The combination of powerful functionality, flexibility and responsive support has made Project Flow an integral part of their practice operations.