When looking for a financial management system to roll out
throughout its sites, the Garden & Leisure Group looked to IRIS
Enterprise Software to provide the solution.
Garden & Leisure Group is a garden centre retailer formed
in 1997. Following the acquisition of 7 garden centres in
between 1997 and 2000, the Group now offers visitors across the
country a unique garden and leisure shopping experience
specialising in quality, value and choice.
When the Garden & Leisure Group acquired the additional
garden centre sites, they were all running a variety of finance
systems. The Group therefore decided to select the most
effective system for its needs and roll it out at head office and
each retail location. The company was also looking for an EPOS
system at the same time, so it identified the market leaders
appropriate for its current size and growth strategy, then carried
out the necessary research.
Dave Murray of the Garden & Leisure Group comments, "The Group
operates in a very fast moving retail environment where timely and
accurate information is critical to be able to respond to the
ever-changing market. Relationships with suppliers are key and
as such accurate supplier based information is crucial. The
business is dramatically seasonal and as such we knew that any
financial management system must be able to cope with periodic
transactional volume far in excess of the annual level."
Garden & Leisure Group immediately dismissed
Sage an option for them as the system was too expensive, would
need to be upgraded within a few years to coincide with business
growth was not particularly user friendly. The company
then short listed Open Accounts, Exchequer from IRIS Enterprise
Software and Navision from Microsoft Business Solutions - making
the final decision to implement Exchequer.
Murray continues, "Exchequer was very competitively priced and
offered us a solution that would grow with the business as well as
being straightforward to use. We also felt that as a company
Exchequer was very entrepreneurial and there were significant
similarities with the way we run our business."
Garden & Leisure Group went live with Exchequer in
September 2001 at its Head Office in Bristol. After trialling
for three months, the system was rolled out across the entire
Group. Murray continues, "As a retailer, we had some specific
requirements that we wanted Exchequer to meet. We worked
together with IRIS Enterprise Software to tailor the system to our
needs and thanks to the OLE integration with Microsoft Excel, all
our answers were provided."
For the Garden & Leisure Group, the main benefit of the
Exchequer OLE functionality has been in the consolidation of the 7
trading companies and 3 non-trading companies in the group. OLE
technology links Excel dynamically to the rich financial management
data held within Exchequer. Pre-implementation the draft
consolidation process took 3-4 days to complete due to the
disparate systems, and at a centre level the accounts took at least
1 day to produce from existing systems. Centres are now able
to produce the monthly accounts instantly via OLE, once processing
has been completed, and are then able to submit a standard format
report. This standard format report is then consolidated using
Excel, and as a result the first draft consolidation now takes less
than 1 hour to complete.
Murray comments, "There are 25-30 people at Garden &
Leisure Group using Exchequer Enterprise on a daily basis, with OLE
forming the core of the accounts model. The beauty of OLE is that
it allows reports to be generated in Excel that are more accessible
to the non-financial members of Centre and Group
Management. These people can have reports written for them (or
even write them themselves) with no risk to the systems integrity,
as they are effectively operating outside the system. OLE
ensures security protocols in the system are maintained, ensuring
Managers only have access to information that they have approval
for."
"It was very important to have a financial management system
being used consistently across all our sites," continues Murray.
"Exchequer is not overly complicated, but it is very intuitive and
does all the things we need and expect it to do. We put
together a short training pack of the product but all users were up
and running within a day, with the general consensus being that it
is a very easy product to use. It is also very rewarding to
make product enhancement suggestions to a company and genuinely see
some of them come to fruition. I know we wouldn't have
received that response from any of the other suppliers we
considered."
Garden & Leisure Group has seen an increase in turnover from
£17-45 million in the past few years. However, during that
time it has not had to upgrade its system with Exchequer or employ
additional accounts staff.
Murray concludes, "Whilst we have seen a massive increase in
business activity and the usual growth in administration that goes
with it, there has been no need to increase our accounts
team. These are clear business benefits that are attributable
to having Exchequer and demonstrate definite efficiency and
productivity gains. We are very happy with the system,
especially as it provides timely information that everyone can
access easily."
