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."