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UKRibby Hall Village is a five-star holiday village set in over 130 acres in Wrea Green, Lancashire.
“Since implementing Xledger, we generally see more accuracy and efficiency because the information is there in front of us and it’s available quicker.”
Ribby Hall Village went live with Xledger in October 2018, so we caught up with Graham Wilkinson, Senior Manager for Finance and IT, who talked us through the results almost three years on.
As a destination with multiple and shared offerings for various customer types, Ribby Hall Village has multiple revenue streams and cost centres. As Graham explained, “We’re a complicated business with lots of different elements, and as the old finance system required different bolt-ons to support each of these elements, it was getting very expensive for little gain. We had to use different systems for different things in the same process – to get it to work properly was complicated.”
Ribby Hall Village needed a system that could handle their complex processes in one place, with powerful modules and integration tools.
“What attracted us to Xledger was the integration of all processes in a singular system, accessed by everyone. With our previous system, technology such as OCR for reading invoices would have been an extra sum. By the time we’d have implemented all the add-ons, it would have been the same cost as Xledger.
The other draw was Xledger’s automation – the automated bank downloads into the system, the opportunities for automatic postings and so on. With the old system, we had to import from the bank manually.
Xledger was clearly ahead of the curve, and it made more sense to move to a true cloud system instead of moving onto the cloud version of our current software. The other systems that we were looking at weren’t true cloud software either, plus we found we could configure Xledger the way we wanted.”
Ribby Hall Village had a substantial amount of data to migrate across from disparate systems into Xledger. As Graham explained, “There was a lot of data and information to move across, but we had a great implementation team who ensured it was a smooth transition.”
He added, “It was great that we undertook the training alongside the software implementation because after each session, we had a collection of takeaways to deal with before moving on to the next step.”
Ribby Hall Village decided to take their time with the implementation process, and Xledger were flexible to accommodate this. “We had a good relationship between the two sides and continue to have a good relationship with our account manager,” he said. “The support team are always very good, and they get back to us really quickly.”
Xledger’s ability to integrate with other software has helped Ribby Hall Village to become more streamlined and efficient. As Graham explained, “We’re pretty thinly resourced anyway, but we’ve managed to implement other software alongside Xledger, which has helped us save a lot of time and resources. We’ve integrated a system that does our food and bar orders, along with invoicing and invoice matching, importing all pre-approved invoices straight into Xledger daily. The automated in-system invoice scanning and recurring invoice emailing in Xledger has saved us lots of time as well.”
Turning the conversation to the pandemic, Graham noted how Xledger’s cloud infrastructure meant the team could carry on without having to worry about accessing the finance system. In his own words, “Because Xledger is cloud-based, we can use the system from anywhere. Xledger allowed certain team members to continue working remotely during COVID, which they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.”
He added, “I also like that because Xledger is cloud based, we receive automatic releases and updates constantly, and I can really see the improvements in the product. I feel comfortable that I can put suggestions forward for changes and improvements, and sometimes they come through in the next release!”
“Since implementing Xledger, we generally see more accuracy and efficiency because the information is there in front of us and it’s available quicker.
Even though we are one business, we have a complicated cost centre structure as the business has multiple revenue streams. What is great about Xledger is that we can pick out different cost centres from the reporting suite and cut the data in various ways giving us a thorough insight into our live financial position.
I think the next exciting step for us will be integrating more systems and utilising the API more. We are looking forward to continuing to develop our business with the Xledger software behind us!”
Speak to one of our dedicated team members for more information on how Xledger can support your business.
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