Case Studies

Zoho

With the trigger of MTD for VAT we were approached by a car servicing/repair/MOT business to implement an integrated accounts solution, previously it had been a combination of paper and spreadsheets. Having looked at their requirements and business structure we identified a potential marketing opportunity in so far as all their current business was, to all intents and purposes, reactive. A customer calls, books a service or MOT, job done, invoice paid, end of story.

We proposed a solution using Zoho Books and the flexible programming available therein to link the new system to DVLA such that when a customers car registration number is entered into the system all vehicle details can be automatically retrieved including MOT date. This gave the opportunity for active marketing with a short email to previous customers at the appropriate time to book their next MOT appointment. We are currently further developing this to send service reminders as well.

They now have a very slick accounting system, with invoices being emailed on the day the work is done and active marketing. This has resulted in both increased sales and a reduction debtor days with the corresponding much improved cash flow.

Xero

An existing client of ours who, amongst other things provides, maintenance services across the country wanted to bring their business into the 21^st century and equip the engineers with tablets for real time reporting on jobs instead of a paper-based system. After investigating the available options, we decided to move the operations side of the business to simPRO which provided all the operations management, CRM and workflow automation that we needed. However simPRO isn’t an accounting system. To use the existing accounting system would have meant re-keying data from simPRO. This would have created additional work and would have been counterproductive to the efficiency savings we were trying to achieve. There were a number of different options available, one of the advantages of  simPRO and part of the reason we chose it was because of it’s integration links with various cloud accounting systems.

The client operates a number of different business including a couple of partnerships and a limited company and so, whilst there was statutory requirements for consolidated accounts, there was a requirement for consolidated management reporting across the businesses. The obvious solutions here was Xero. As well as having and existing interface with simPRO we were able to add additional reporting codes to the nominal ledger accounts of all the different business so that management accounting reports could be produced for individual businesses and the same reports produced, consolidated for the group as a whole.

The end result was and still is

1. Some very happy engineers who didn’t need to come to the office every Monday morning to pick up their week’s paperwork
2. Realtime information in the office for completed jobs, problem jobs and all associated data
3. Increased efficiency in the field with the engineers having to complete various steps in the workflow before moving on to the next job
4. Same day invoicing to customers and no missing paperwork, resulting in far fewer invoice queries and corresponding improvements in cash flow.
5. Real time management accounting reports