How the Solid Wood Flooring Company saves days of work with iplicit

“It’s probably going to save a day, if not two days, of work for me or whoever’s going to do the audit,” says Rob Eckersley, director of the Solid Wood Flooring Company, after the business adopted iplicit as its finance platform.

Soon after moving to iplicit from QuickBooks, the business was not only seeing substantial timesavings, but also benefiting from detailed financial reporting and integration with its stock system.

“It’s fantastic, the speed at which you can do things on iplicit,” says Rob.

“During the audit, we have to pull through information on stocks and purchases and sales with the various types of industry certification.

“iplicit’s support team helped build reports that pulled out all that information. It’s absolutely brilliant and we can export it nice and easily.”

The London and Gloucestershire-based business manufactures wood flooring as well as laminates and a polymer composite called Impervia.

Residential developments form the bulk of its revenue stream, but it also installs floors in museums, restaurants, high-end clothing stores, and hotels such as the Amano in Covent Garden.

Why change accounting software?

The business needed new accounting software after QuickBooks announced it would be discontinuing support for its desktop version for UK customers without moving all the features online.

“It took me two and a half months of searching the internet,” says founder and chief executive Martyn Ryder.

“I found many other systems from SAP lots of others. I looked at, AccountsIQ, but they didn’t have a stock system and there were some other restrictions. So primarily I was attracted by the way iplicit’s system was set up, the menu, the ease of the dropdown lists. It was similar to QuickBooks – but without the restrictions with regard to what you can do with the system and the information you can pull out.

“The iplicit support team is amazing and the flexibility of that system compared to QuickBooks is so much better. And it’s not that much more expensive on a monthly basis.”

Integration with the stock system

A major requirement for the Solid Wood Flooring Company was for the finance platform to integrate fully with the stock system, says Rob, and the business worked with iplicit support staff on the issue.

“We capture everything that we have in the stock system and the team will use that then to double check levels and availability. We'll look at it for what we need to order and how to best manage time flows.

“Then there are the usual things such as invoicing or sales orders or getting quotes out and getting those confirmed, tracking how successfully the business is going. All of these are very often daily processes for us.”

The system also needed to be customised to capture core industry-specific information, such as the various certifications that are attached to wood-based products and their sustainability.

“That has been fantastic,” says Rob.

“When it was time for audit, we could access all that information very quickly.”

Day-to-day experience using iplicit

“Everybody here has to do their own invoicing, follow-up, paying-off and everything else,” says Martyn of his seven iplicit users.

“iplicit’s menu is quick and very simple to use. It took people only three or four weeks to really get used to the system and feel confident using it.”

Rob adds: “It’s such a clear and simple user interface. The access is very easy, so if you want to go deep into the detail, the system allows you to do that. But if you do just want to check out something quickly, you can simply type it in.

“Products like Xero and Sage, and QuickBooks online, pale in comparison to iplicit. They don’t have the diversity and depth of functionality that we need – the stock control, the sales orders, purchase orders and all that information.”

Favourite iplicit features

“One of my favourite features in iplicit is that, whatever you have open, you can leave it in the sidebar, and just go back to it, press refresh, and it updates the information instantly,” says Martyn.

Rob says: “I like the analytics element.

“QuickBooks had a fantastic array of inbuilt reports you could pull off, which worked very well, but we now have the ability to customise those reports to a very fine degree. I can see us using that a lot. You can just email the support team and within an hour or so they’ve got back to you and built it, so you can just run the report.

“Having a UK-based helpdesk means that we can get the help in our time zone and communicate with people, whether on the phone or via email, and they’ll understand the requirements,” adds Rob.

“With QuickBooks, they outsource that support. The people that they had working with them were wonderful, really nice people but you then had a barrier you had to get through, so you had to be extremely exact.”

Take a peek at iplicit’s multi company accounting software.

Download The Solid Wood Flooring case study

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