Tripadee (trading as Cool Camping) is a great listing and SaaS business which endorses high quality campsites and facilitates booking through their own software. The business is a recognised name and was built from scratch by the team.
The challenge
The business was reliant on a key member of the team to manage all financial matters and as the company and its complexity grew, this was proving hard to move to scale. The team were using Sage, they were self taught and managing it well but also recognised that an improved and process led finance function was needed. This would allow the organisational knowledge to be baked into software and a wider team understanding of what was needed and how to deliver it. In addition the founder wanted to have strong monthly management accounts which he could share with his board, and interrogate the data live.
The solution
Having scoped the required work through discovery meetings, we led a transitional piece of consultancy, with detailed mapping of each key business process. This allowed us to “swimlane” out what a revised process could look like, to free up existing role holder to focus on more strategic matters, and to allow the day to day of financial management to become more efficient. We brought all customer data across from Sage to Xero, setting up a large number of repeat invoices to reduce the monthly load and also ensuring a rhythm of new and existing customers could be reported against. We also built a simple process for deferred income posting to ensure the monthly management reports were reflective of activity.
The result
We now work closely with the business, having acted as a virtual FD for a period of change, and also providing monthly reporting and quarterly enhanced insight. The business has been able to respond with agility to changing market conditions during the pandemic, and can see the impact of the levers that they’ve pulled to bring about growth.
Strata have transformed our finance function. It used to be a drag on our time and resources, but we now have such up-to-date visibility over management accounts and all our financial information that we can now harness that data and make it work for us. We now use that real time financial data to make business decisions and plan ahead, so it's made us more agile as a business, which gives us a competitive edge. Kate and Phil have gone to great lengths to understand our business and we now consider them part of our team.
Director, Cool Camping, Nov 2021
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