Wovenhill was born in 2001 and operates an online store offering a wide range of high-quality wicker home storage products and related accessories. 

Overview

Following a recommendation Wovenhill chose GJA to implement and manage a new cloud-based accounting application using Xero. An analysis of business processes and challenges identified a number of other areas where use of the right technology would lead to time savings and operational improvement.

Our contributions:

• Fully understand the problems and goals.
• Identify and implement the right cloud-based technology solutions.
• Provide access to real time financial information
• Improved efficiency to free time to allow maximum focus on sales, marketing and customer fulfilment. 
• Improved GJA Financial Management Technology Index score from 9/24 at outset to 18/24 at completion.

Context & Challenge

Background

Wovenhill commenced a review of their accountants after receiving no support when moving software to meet HMRC’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) requirements. 

The GJA Financial Management Technology Index* score at outset: 9 

*The GJA Technology Index measures the level of successful adoption of financial management technology within the business. A score of 1 being the lowest and 24 the highest. 

The problem – the why?

Key problems were:

• The only involvement from the previous accountants was to prepare annual accounts post year end. 
• Day to day accounting was time consuming, with areas such as VAT returns and stock reconciliation undertaken by the founder.
• The process of moving from Sage Desktop to Sage Online was managed solely by the founder with no assistance from the accountant.
• Sage online was cumbersome, including a number of areas where items were duplicated. 
• Processes were very time consuming and involved a lot of manual intervention. 

Project goals

Key goals were:

• Simplify processes to save time and money.
• Improve usability of software
• Generate better management information.
• Enable greater focus on sales, marketing and customer fulfilment.

Process & Insights

During the ‘getting to know you’ process the following points were identified:

• A large volume of small value transactions took place.
• There were a number of errors in the original Sage Online Set-up.
• Sage Online was not reconciling to the bank account. 
• The client was spending many hours each month managing the system at the expense of other priorities.
• The Amazon account was only being logged in the software when a drawdown was completed meaning sales and accounts were not reconciling.

Solutions

Our team, led by a Director and a Client Manager, collaborated closely with the founder of Wovenhill to evaluate solutions to the problems. This resulted in GJA managing a project covering:

• Xero, cloud-based accounting solution implementation 
• Conversion of prior year end to Xero to ensure correct opening balances. 
• As part of transfer to Xero GJA also reconciled first two months to ensure all systems and processes running correctly.
• Following month 3 handover to client he now plans to undertake work himself for two months to learn the system and may then pass back to GJA to do work moving forward. 
• Veeqo, cloud-based inventory and shipping application for ecommerce – with API links to eBay, PayPal and Wicker, plus  automatic post of every sale to Xero.
• Xero now pulls through vast amount of sales automatically, with client undertaking a very small amount of manual work on key accounts by personal preference.
• Amazon to be automatically integrated to Xero as soon as they release a Xero API. 
• Hub Doc, cloud-based solution that extracts key information from receipts, bills and invoices and imports to Xero to remove need for manual data entry and filing 
• Training provided to client, who was immediately competent and immediately looking ahead to future improvements that he could make. 

Results

A great start. It’s still early days, yet the results have exceeded expectations:

• Far less focus on administration.
• Improved financial visibility.
• Improved stock control.
• Far more focus on sales, marketing and customer fulfilment. 
• Future areas for improvement have been identified eg automation of Amazon journals

The GJA Financial Management Technology Index* score now: 18