Ganden
A 170MB production document, 65 daily users, and no room left to grow — optimised in place, with no migration and no rebuild.
Engineering & Infrastructure Consulting
Ganden
Cut entry time by 73%
What was the business challenge?
Ganden is a Gold Coast-based engineering consultancy specialising in water infrastructure design, with over 1,000 completed projects and nearly 70 staff across seven offices throughout Australia. For over five years, two of its operational leaders, working without any outside development support, had built the entire backbone of the business inside a single Coda document: timesheets, project tracking, bids, financials, invoicing, and task management.
The system was a genuine achievement. It had grown to over 170 MB, supporting a master table with 5,000+ rows across 315 columns and 133 real-time metric columns running calculations across the entire dataset. More than 50,000 timesheet rows had accumulated over the years, managed through a manual archiving process into a separate document. And 65 people depended on it every day.
That lack of speed was costing the team daily. Every timesheet entry took roughly 11 seconds. Creating a new project could take nearly two minutes. With 20 to 30 people working simultaneously, one person’s entry slowed everyone else down.
“What you’re doing is amazing and it’s well beyond our capabilities.”
— Nick Steer, Operations Manager, Ganden
Our plan to solve it
SimplaDocs started with a comprehensive doc audit to identify exactly where the performance drag was coming from. The root cause was clear: over a hundred metric columns were recalculating on every single timesheet entry, cascading computation across every concurrent user. On top of that, default filter settings were forcing full recalculations every time a new project was created.
The performance fixes were surgical and immediate. Critical roll-up columns were converted to scheduled automations that refreshed hourly instead of recalculating in real time, and filter defaults were reset to eliminate unnecessary computation. None of this required changing how the team worked day to day.
With the immediate pain resolved, SimplaDocs turned to the deeper structural problem: tens of thousands of timesheet rows with no automated management. They designed and built a complete archiving and restoration system spanning Google Sheets and Coda, connected by automated scripts. Historical data syncs continuously, projects flagged as active stay live, and archived data can be pulled back when needed — because in engineering consulting, closed projects sometimes reopen months later.
The archiving system passed its ultimate test during invoicing week, when 20+ project managers reviewed all active project finances simultaneously. The entire cycle ran without a single issue.
What we delivered
What we achieved together
Timesheet entry dropped from roughly 11 seconds to 3 seconds across 65 daily users and 1,500 entries per month
New bids and projects went from nearly two minutes to under six seconds
Automated archiving and restoration replaced a manual copy-paste process across 69,000+ rows
Xero integration removed a manual export-and-paste consuming hours of the Managing Director’s week
A six-week audit expanded into a 15 hr/week retainer with no end date
How the engagement actually ran
How long did it take?
A six-week doc audit that expanded into an ongoing retainer at 15 hours a week, with no end date.
What did the engagement look like?
A fixed-scope performance audit first, then an open-ended retainer at 15 hours a week run through weekly syncs. Nick restructured Ganden’s own internal meetings to keep those syncs focused purely on implementation.
Which systems did it touch?
- Coda
- Google Sheets
- Xero
The real impact we generated
SimplaDocs optimised the live production document while 65 people continued using it every day. No migration. No rebuild. No disruption. Measurable results arrived within weeks, and every improvement was validated by actual user feedback before being rolled out.
What you’ve done so far is fantastic. Everything you’re doing, we’re sort of seeing immediate improvements and results.
— Nick Steer, Operations Manager, Ganden
Where it is now
With the core infrastructure in place, the scope expanded to other operational drag. Bid and sales dashboards, automated timesheet reminders, and resource planning tools joined the roadmap, and an employee performance reporting system was built to generate individual and team reports across all 70 staff in time for annual reviews.
“We’re definitely keen to keep this engagement going for the foreseeable,” Nick said. “We’ve just started.”
Let's build something like this
Every engagement starts with a conversation about what's not working and what could be.