"Moving to BookCheck from an inhouse set up has been an excellent experience. All our team have taken well to the new way of working and we’ve found your team excellent to work with. It’s transformed our processes and we now have quality MI."
Andy Hill, Director.
The King of Shaves Company Ltd
Will King created King of Shaves in his kitchen in 1993 when he was fed up of suffering from razor irritation when using shaving foams and gels. He experimented with essential oils and created his first product – King of Shaves Original Shaving Oil – he hand-filled the first 10,0000 bottles over his kitchen sink and got the products into Harrods and Boots the Chemist. Since then the company has gone from strength to strength and now exports to the USA, Australia and New Zealand amongst others.
Before BookCheck
- Complex accounting and stock management system
- A need for more channelled reporting
- Getting information from Amazon is a pain
- Their current accounting system contract was finishing so they wanted to take the opportunity to swap to a simpler system.
Before BookCheck - the problems
King of Shaves Company Ltd reached out to BookCheck for major assistance in streamlining their accounting system and processes, principally to make major cost savings. Their accounting and stock management software was too complex and expensive. A need to change to a cloud-based solution was identified and Xero was chosen as their accounting system. At the outset the client was determined to use every available Xero add-on.
With BookCheck
- Migrating to Xero
- BookCheck Advanced Reporting
- Xero Add ons to help simplify processes
With BookCheck - the Solutions
BookCheck was tasked with handling the transfer to Xero from the old system and setting up processes & controls to ensure the success of the new accounting system. One of the key pressures we had for this project was time. We started working with King of Shaves at the end of October 2018 but their old system expired at the end of November 2018. Therefore, Xero and all the new systems had to be up and running by 1st December 2018.
King of Shaves identified ManuOnline as being suitable as it offered the functionality they required for inventory management. BookCheck worked closely with King of Shave staff to ensure the data from ManuOnline was being mapped correctly to Xero. This included numerous tests before going live on 1st December. BookCheck also added controls and processes to ensure CoGS calculated correctly each month in Xero. This has been further developed for their new financial year, offering this information in more detail by making full use of Xero tracking.
Gain – Greater control of stock and visibility of Gross Profit Margin per retailer.
It was clear from their old system that reconciling Amazon payments and sales had been a real struggle. Adding to this, King of Shaves used Amazon Pay for sales made directly on their own website. On the bank feed in Xero, both the receipts from Amazon – relating to Amazon sales – and the receipts from Amazon Pay – relating to direct internet sales – were annotated in the same way, so there was no way to distinguish between the two. We introduced A2X and solved this problem immediately. Sales information from Amazon is now fed through to A2X directly, where it is consolidated into one invoice to forward to Xero. This invoice represents all sales and relevant deductions for that period and mirrors the payment made by Amazon. It can then be matched instantly to the transaction on the bank feed, identifying all other Amazon receipts as relating to the Amazon Pay account. This has saved six hours every Amazon Pay cycle (typically every 2 weeks) and will split invoices if the two weeks span a month end. Data can be entered into Xero in real time every time Amazon sends a payment.
When King of Shaves said they were then going to change their website and implement Shopify and were looking for a solution to manage this, we automatically thought of utilising A2X’s new Shopify platform. Again we assisted in setting this up, ensuring all payments coming into Xero on the bank feeds could be easily recognised as internet sales and reconciled. Internet sales can now be pulled through daily rather than once a month at month end.
Our next task was to set up a system for staff expenses. Expensify was identified as being a good fit for King of Shaves. This was simple to set up and link to Xero. It was embraced by all at King of Shaves and has been working seamlessly since. This is now linked to Shopify payments, PayPal, Amazon Pay and split it – posting to control accounts which can easily be reconciled to bank feeds – saving around 2 hours a month.
A further add-on relating to expenses was also introduced; Soldo. This gave prepaid cards to members of staff to allow for business purchases. Previously there had been one company credit card, where the statements had to be imported each month into Xero. With Soldo, this became a thing of the past. Transactions flow through on a bank feed and are easily reconciled to purchases made. There is a greater control over spending as each card has its own limit rather than everyone using the same "company" card.
This has saved around an hour a month.
Finally, we introduced King of Shaves to Fluidly for Automated Credit Control. Within two months of using Fluidly to send payment reminders, statements and copy invoices, there was a reduction in average debtor days from 76 to 49. This has also been used in chasing historical debt identified when moving from the old system to Xero.
Fluidly has made communication with the retailers much easier in terms of getting remittances and clearing up payment queries.
We continue to work with King of Shaves to produce their monthly management accounts, created by the team at BookCheck and always checked by one of our qualified Accountants. We very much look forward to what the future holds and assisting King of Shaves with their further system developments.