Woodland Commercial Improves Invoicing Procedure With Help of SAP® Crystal Reports®
Woodland Commercial Ltd, an experienced building company, specialising in providing a professional and reliable building service to the London area and the Home Counties, had a requirement to improve their standard Pegasus invoicing process to meet the growing needs of the business.
The Challenge
For a period of eighteen months the Administration Team at Woodland Commercial Ltd worked with a pre-built Crystal Reports invoice that had been delivered as part of their Pegasus accounting package.
This information was then passed to the Finance Team in paper format who in turn rekeyed the same data into an Excel spreadsheet, which had been formatted in-house to include the company logo and other information necessary to meet the company’s invoicing requirements. This was then dispatched to the customer.
The whole process was both time consuming and prone to operator error. We never had the expertise in-house to customise the Crystal Reports template that had been delivered with the Pegasus accounting package and we had been led to believe that it was not possible to modify the template in any case.
Bridie Ayres, Administrator
The Solution
Woodland Commercial realised that it was becoming more and more necessary to improve this time consuming process. At this point, Steve Archer, Director, simply typed in “Crystal Reports Services” to Google and was presented with DSCallards’ website, www.crystalreports.co.uk, and gave them a call.
Within a week of calling, a DSCallards Consultant had been on site and had built a report to resolve the business problem.
We took the pre-built Crystal Reports invoice template that had been originally delivered with the Pegasus package, customised and formatted it to include the fields required by Woodland Commercial, tested it and then embedded the invoice back into the reporting module of the Pegasus software.
DSCallards
The Business Benefit
Five days after DSCallards visit, Woodland Commercial went live with the Crystal Reports invoice in the new format that had been devised in accordance with their requirements.
As a result of the work carried out, there is no need to pass the data to the Finance Team to re-key into an Excel spreadsheet as the invoice is now in the format required by the customer. This has also led to increased confidence in the data being produced as it is taken directly from the source database.
There are direct savings from the work carried out by DSCallards. It used to take the Accounts Team two-three hours each week to re-key the data into the Excel spreadsheet. The work carried out by DSCallards has helped to streamline processes – freeing up valuable time and simplifying the invoicing production process.
By maximizing the features provided within Crystal Reports, we have since recognised the power of the software and are now beginning to think about how we can use the features and functionality to bring further bottom line benefits and savings to our business.
