AGI Australasia Ltd
AGI Australasia Ltd imports sports and recreation shoes, including major brands Avia, Ryka for women and the AND1 range of basketball footwear and clothing. In addition to supplying chains such as Rebel Sport and Great Outdoors, AGI also outfit basketball teams such as the Tall Blacks, the Nelson Giants and the Canterbury Rams. After growth of over 60% in the past year, AGI’s old Prophet accounting system was not coping. “Every time we asked our IT support person to 'fix' it," says AGI Office Manager Wendy Tolchard, “she suggested we evaluate an Accredo system - when we did it was just ‘yes, yes, yes’ to every question.” Since switching to Accredo Mercury, AGI save more than a day every month in printing reports and statements and two hours every time a sales rep wants a stock list; they have halved the amount of paperwork in the office; and have benefited in many other ways as well. “It used to take me a couple of hours each time ... Now, I just click a button and Accredo emails it in a couple of seconds.” Kathryn McCarthy (left, with Office Manager Wendy Tolchard) Office Administrator, AGI Australasia Ltd Less is more. Before installing Accredo Mercury, AGI used to virtually shut down their office for one or two days a month in order to print statements and reports. “ Our printers would work all day producing huge, hard-to-follow reports that nobody every looked at,” says Wendy, “but we had to have them in case we were ever audited. Now, we click a button and a couple of simple reports are emailed to management as a PDF file. And because all our historical data is stored in our Accredo system, we can reprint copies of statements and invoices or report on other information at any time without having to keep hard copies.” AGI have also customised many of their reports with the help of their Accredo Qualified Support Person (QSP), Kirsten Adams-Ford of CAT IT Ltd. “Because each member of our sales team focuses on a different product range,” explains Wendy, “we produce different stock lists for each sales person.” These stock lists were previously produced by Office Administrator Kathryn McCarthy laboriously cutting and pasting information exported from their old system into Excel and then reassembled to suit each representative. “It used to take me a couple of hours each time,” says Kathryn,“ and the information was out of date straight away. Now, I just click a button and Accredo saves the latest data as an Excel file and emails it straight to the rep in a couple of seconds.” Each report is customised to show only the products relevant to the sales rep concerned, and a master report including landed costs as well as quantities has been created for AGI’s Manager in Auckland. Accredo improves the game for every team member. In addition to saving time and reducing the need to produce and store paperwork in the office, the AGI team find Accredo very useful when they are helping customers. “If a customer wants a product in a certain size,” says Kathryn, “I can filter the appropriate product report to show just the quantities available in the requested size(s).” And when a client requests a copy of a misplaced invoice, there is no more sifting through physical copies of old paperwork or faxing documents – Kathryn just locates the invoice in the customer’s transaction list, and clicks once to email it to the customer as a PDF file. While Kathryn focuses on assisting the sales team and customers, Wendy has found Accredo an invaluable tool for credit control. “When you are busy, it’s easy to overlook a customer who is in arrears, but by simply adding an alarm or selecting Stop Credit on a customer record, we are reminded to ensure we are paid before the next shipment is sent out,” she says. | "It used to take me a couple of hours each time... Now, I just click a button and Accredo emails it in a couple of seconds."Kathryn McCarthy (left, with Office Manager Wendy Tolchard) Office Administrator, AGI Australasia Ltd
Wendy also uses Accredo to monitor promotional sales, which are discounted up to a certain budget. Previously, this was calculated manually for each customer, taking up one or two days of Kathryn's time every month. “Now this information is stored in Accredo,” says Wendy. “I just click a button to produce a report, which is always up-to-date.” Finally, Accredo's Sales Analysis reports outline sales to each customer by product, allowing sales reps to plan their sales calls effectively and attend to each customer’s needs on a regular basis. “Whatever we ask for, the Accredo team are either working on it or can already provide a good solution.” Support from the pavement up A veteran of four accounting software upgrades, Wendy was somewhat apprehensive about the move to Accredo, but confessed later to QSP Kirsten that it was “by far the easiest” migration she had experienced. “The team at Profax provided all the tools and support to make it easy,” says Kirsten, “and the conversion tools let us bring historical data from Prophet into Accredo, where it was immediately available for reporting and analysis.” As part of the conversion, AGI also restructured their General Ledger to accommodate the recent addition of an outlet store to their business. This was again made easy by both the built-in tools that come with Accredo - the General Ledger was exported into Excel for manipulation, then the Alias Codes function was used to change existing codes to meet the new format – and by support from the developers of Accredo, who supplied a handy tool for importing the new chart of accounts back into Accredo once changes had been made. "The support from both Kirsten and the Accredo team has been great,” says Wendy. “Whatever we ask for, they are either working on it or can already provide a good solution." View PDF |
