Golden Hare Books Case Study
Golden Hare Books, 68 St Stephen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 5AQ
We were approached by Golden Hare Books, who had heard about our work from an existing client. Golden Hare Books is a lovely, independent bookshop based in a very busy area of Edinburgh. During lockdown, like many other enterprising businesses, the store had boosted their online trading significantly.
A boost in online trading was great for business, but as sales were coming in through a variety of payment channels, too much time was being spent analysing sales – and manually keeping records. This was diverting crucial staff time away from helping readers choose and buy books.
Additionally, the staff had implemented Xero, but didn’t really know how best to use it. They knew it could work better, but weren’t sure where to start.
The Process
We suggested a healthcheck. This involves a face to face (virtual is fine) meeting to talk through the current frustrations in your finance processing – and to identify what is missing, what could be better, what could be easier.
We then spent some time after the meeting having a look in more detail at Xero and reviewing other accounting records which had been shared with us by the team.
Having completed this work, we prepared a report identifying our key takeaways and some suggested improvements. For Golden Hare Books, this broke down in to three key areas:
Actions taken
Automate sales information from Shopify to Xero. This is a really common issue – and we see this a lot. Shopify reporting is pretty good, but the sales figures you get in Shopify just don’t somehow match up to what you receive at your bank.
Not only that – but the income you receive at your bank might have fees deducted – and be made up of all sorts of sales, with all sorts of VAT treatment. This was very definitely a source of difficulty at Golden Hare Books. Putting this right became a manual reconciliation process which was just too time consuming.
This wasn’t a quick fix – we came up with an issue at Shopify with the reporting of VAT, although, using the third party integrator tool we suggested, we were able to come up with a good workaround.
The data now flows straight from Shopify to Xero with no intervention required. All sales are broken down by product type and with the correct VAT treatment.
Payouts received at the bank are now able to be matched against an invoice – and so they get to have the joy of seeing the bank line ‘go green’. Irrespective of payment channel, the team are now able to run a quick report at a month end to show how Shopify sales have been recorded in Xero.
Manage purchases better! Generally there was an over reliance on waiting until supplier bills had been paid to record them in Xero. This means that the team were using paper records to work out who to pay and how much. Add in that there is a very industry specific tool for booksellers called Batch to manage payments to the myriad number of publishers they buy from – and the whole thing got pretty complex.
By integrating Batch to manage costs of goods – thanks to Xero’s very open API, there are all sorts of integrations available which are not widely known. This was not one we had previously worked with, but liaising with Batch themselves, we were able to set up an integration direct.
This allowed all the publisher invoices to be brought directly in to Xero, correctly and appropriately coded – and with the correct VAT treatment. Additionally, once the team at Golden Hare had approved the invoices on the Batch portal, the integration would mark those invoices as paid.
The result was a significant improvement in processing time. With our accountant heads on, we were also delighted to see the improvement for the audit trail. Real visibility, down to invoice number and product name of what had been purchased, what was approved and what was paid. And what’s more, real visibility about what was not paid, what was still outstanding.
Again – we set up a quick report process by which the client can check – and ‘prove’ what the Batch accounts show as we believe it’s important that you can believe the numbers in your accounts.
And by Integrating Hubdoc to manage other expenses– whilst we love the additional functionality of Dext Prepare, there is a cost attached – and for this client, there was no reason why we wouldn’t just implement Hubdoc – which is free – and would do the job well!
We set up Hubdoc, demonstrated its use and provided a process map with clear instructions on how to use it. We were delighted to see how the team responded to this great, free app – and also to see how this had improved their user experience!
Finally - we suggested some additional automations at the bank. When we started, the team had 800 unreconciled transactions arising from just a 6 week period. These were time consuming to deal with.
Whilst putting in place the automations we had would deal with lots of these transactions, we were able to suggest some straight-forward bank rules so that the team could accurately and consistently deal with other recurring transactions – payroll payments, bank charges and so on.
The Handover
Once we had set up and rigorously tested the automations and integrations we had put in place, we wrote a set of instructions for the team at Golden Hare.
We set a final meeting, demonstrated the processes we were suggesting they follow by completing this for a month together.
Once we were sure they were confident and really happy with the work which had been done, we prepared a note for their accountants, outlining the actions which had been taken – so everything is clear.
But you shouldn’t just hear about this from us – so we thought we would ask the Golden Hare team to give their perspective too:
“Anyone who runs a small business knows that there are certain jobs that you should hire an expert to do, and we’re really glad that Rosie and Accountability were recommended to help us to make the most of the various systems we use. Our financial reporting processes have now been streamlined, and many hours will be saved, which we can much better spend selling books!
Rosie’s enthusiasm, clear expertise, and willingness to take on a challenge gave us confidence in her ability to solve our issues. We were consulted and collaborated with at every stage of the process; Rosie spent a considerable amount of time testing the integrations Accountability put in place, and ensuring that we were happy with how everything worked.
We plan to keep in touch with Rosie, and we will not hesitate to ask Accountability to help us again in the future.”