The company was using a very clunky, expensive and time-consuming Sage 200 system. Sales had to be double entered and bank transactions manually posted, then reconciled. The stock financial reconciliations were very fiddly. It was not a user friendly or intuitive system.

It could be very slow at times, especially when running reports. This could result in ‘freezing’ which meant everyone had to log out.

Stock reordering was very difficult.

Financial reports were very basic e.g. it was not possible to produce a comparative P&L. A lot of obsolete data (such as old customers and suppliers, bills of material) couldn’t be deleted – adding to the clumsiness and slowness.

In short, a time consuming, basic system, which was overcomplicated and required a lot of manual intervention.

Some of the stock, order and sales processes were very time consuming and inefficient. None of the systems spoke to each other. This made ensuring enough stock was available very tricky.

Sales from abroad increased massively. Orders are processed through the website – via a Shopify store. But Shopify doesn’t speak to Sage directly, so all transactions had to be manually entered.

Payments for Shopify orders come from different sources, such as credit cards and finance providers. This also did not link to Sage, so all receipts had to be manually entered and reconciled, using clearing accounts (due to the nature of how Sage recorded the sales). This meant reconciling at month end was a mammoth task.