Greentree recording success at Video 2000

Business growth, new tax legislation and entertainment format shifts meant Video needed a new system for managing its financials...

Since 1982 Video 2000 has grown to be the fourth largest video store owner operator in Australia with over 100 rental stores. These are a mix of wholly-owned stores and franchises, with stock levels exceeding half a million movies. The group's affairs and its 11 different distribution companies are managed by a family group and an active Board of Directors.

Business growth and tax implications prompted a review of Video 2000's business setup and existing financial software, CBA.

Market trends such as the move towards DVD rental over video changed the industry and meant Video 2000 needed a system flexible enough to monitor this impact and manage business critical information as director Brian Brent explains.

“The business growth hit a point where we had to change our systems,” he says. “The main drivers for moving to Greentree were the introduction of GST, the attraction of the strong data importing facility and more flexibility of reporting.”

Video 2000 implemented Greentree in time for the introduction of  GST.

“We were sort of pioneers with Greentree,” says Brent. “The design of the system, plus the complexity of our business meant everyone was learning. We looked at a few other products, but we were comfortable with CBA and the new product from the same developers, Greentree.”

With the introduction of Greentree, he says the whole office changed over to Windows. “Some personnel weren't keen about using a new system at first, but now they trust it and would not want to go back.”

Video 2000 draws heavily on the Greentree financial system and has very specific business requirements. Due to the high volume of data, processing and analysing reports in CBA for each of the 100 stores meant there were speed issues.

These complex financial reporting structures, budget modelling and transaction entry were addressed and streamlined using Greentree’s Excel reporting tool. Finance controller, John Rashleigh, describes the impact on processing over 1400 AP invoices per month, “Excel is without doubt the biggest bonus,” he says.

“The high volume of processing has been improved by Greentree’s integration with Excel. The AP invoicing is all matched against orders in external databases and processed by the Excel import and avoids manually keying in high volume of invoices. Now it’s all automated.”

The ability to manage and produce all reports using Excel has been a big change for the company. Greentree’s Excel integration has reduced the demand on staff time. Rashleigh says monthly reporting has been reduced from 1½ days to four hours for over 80 reports.

“The monthly report run now takes from four hours compared to a week using CBA.” The management of GST has also been alleviated. “To record and process GST now takes five minutes compared to 30,” he says. “Greentree saves us a couple of times a month having to manually report GST.”

One specific requirement of Video 2000's was to better manage the large data flow of sales reports from each store to the headquarters and be able to process them directly in Greentree. The Greentree Business Partner has specifically streamlined the sales import giving the management team true sales figures in the General Ledger instantaneously.

“We can just go and pick a store to run a report rather than having to do a full run. The ability to get customisations done at a reasonable cost is an advantage of working with the Greentree team.”

Video 2000 are heavy users of Greentree’s user defined transaction analysis trees which allows it to group its information, such as business units or geographical locations, for use at report time for sorting and sub-totalling at any level.

The support team set up 11 separate companies in the system which meant the data was more manageable, particularly when Video 2000 needed to produce a balance sheet and a profit and loss report per month per store.

This powerful feature means the management team can easily tailor many standard Greentree reports and can summarise financial information within Excel. Previously, in CBA they used over 30,000 General Ledger accounts for all stores.

“The big attraction for us was to simplify our chart of accounts,” says Rashleigh. “Greentree’s transaction trees have helped our ‘multi-branch’ system. Maintaining the chart based on that set up is so simple. Now there are only 1000 General Ledger accounts in Greentree.”

Greentree is also keeping pace with Video 2000’s growth, says Brent. “Greentree is doing everything it needs to do. We aim to continue to streamline our processes and speed up reporting. Greentree’s automation and integration has relieved us of all the manual processes saving staff time and costs.”

For more information

www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/video_2000.cfm

Graham Hill
(09) 366 3897
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

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