McCallum Bros' flexible new invoicing process

The business situation

This family-owned Auckland aggregate company is the leading supplier of sand and red rock to major ready-mix concrete manufacturers, who supply concrete for commercial, industrial and domestic construction use across the Auckland region. McCallum Bros. Ltd. also supplies sand for equestrian arenas, sports field maintenance, beach replenishment and landscaping. Their red rock can be seen throughout New Zealand and is identifiable by its characteristic warm red look. Jane explains that deliveries to their major customers are on a continuous supply basis and not necessarily a costed job with a one-off delivery date. The systems she looked at treated each delivery as a complete job and raised an invoice accordingly, but this simply didn’t fit with how the business operated. She says the flexibility to list multiple deliveries on one invoice without it needing to be a completed job could only be found in Greentree. “The flexibility of Greentree’s invoicing alone was good enough reason to make the decision to implement it, and our directors, customers and accounts staff are extremely happy with that decision,” says Jane.

Another key factor was business growth, which had brought the old Attaché system to its knees. When the directors couldn’t get the reporting information they needed to make informed decisions, Jane contacted the local Greentree partner. She recalled previous contact with the Greentree consultant which left her with a positive lasting impression.

Invoicing ‘your way’

Jane explains how in the previous invoicing process “we used to do one computerised invoice on Attaché with a manual list of all of the delivery dockets that related to it. This had to be done on a batch-type basis at the end of month, so this process took quite a few days and we probably weren’t getting our invoices and statements out until about the 10th working day. Greentree allows us the flexibility to add delivery dockets to a ‘live’ invoice throughout the month, so now we get them out by about the second working day.” This has had a positive flow-on effect to cash management.

Job Costing adapted to track truck costs

Jane says they adapted job costing to track and analyse direct costs associated with each individual truck. She says this adaptation has been invaluable in ensuring that all costs occurred whilst undertaking core business activities are reported. This is extremely helpful in asset management and presenting an accurate view of direct business-related costs.

Simply superior reporting

Business growth was driving a need for more sophisticated levels of reporting, and Jane says extracting the data to produce reports was extremely difficult in the old system. She says, “I love how I can drag and drop data into Excel”, and this has enabled her to produce timely and accurate reports for the directors at any time, since the information in Greentree is always available and up-to-the-minute. Apart from this, she’s able to produce reports in a meaningful format which everyone understands, and the adaptation of Job Costing to track and report truck costs raises the bar on accuracy so management can rely on the figures for a multitude of strategic decisions.

Confident go-live without a parallel system

When the decision was made to implement Greentree, a go-live date was set and Jane confidently states they didn’t run a parallel system because the old system wasn’t integrated, so attempting to compare data in the integrated Greentree system was pointless. Another key factor was that Greentree’s best practice and integrated environment meant that business reporting would be so fundamentally different to the way they had been doing things that again, there was little point in running the two systems in parallel. Once all the business data was entered into Greentree, it was live from day one without any disruption to business continuity.

Jane says the Greentree partner has provided outstanding post-implementation support. She reckons Greentree has been very easy for staff to learn, and even a staff member with 30 years’ service who was initially “petrified and required a little hand-holding” now doesn’t want to think about how things used to be done and time spent on monotonous tasks.

Greentree has streamlined and automated the invoice process whilst eliminating hundreds of hours of manual data processing. Management and directors have the level of reporting required to make confident decisions about McCallum’s continuing reputation as a key supplier to Auckland’s infrastructure customers.