Since 1982, Video 2000 has grown steadily to become the fourth largest video-store owner and 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.

Despite its success, business growth and tax implications prompted a review of the company’s business set-up and existing financial software, CBA.

Market trends, such as the change-over from video to DVD rental, changed the industry and meant Video 2000 needed to move to a system that was flexible enough to monitor the impact of such changes, as well as manage business-critical information.

Director Brian Brent explains, “Business growth hit a point where we had to change our systems. The main drivers for moving to Greentree were the introduction of GST and the attraction of Greentree’s strong data-importing facility and more flexible reporting.”

Video 2000 implemented Greentree in early 2001, in time with the introduction of GST in Australia. “As with any new product, we were pioneers with Greentree. The business design of the system, plus the complexity of our business, meant everyone was learning,” says Brent.

“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 the whole office changed over to Windows.

“Some people weren’t keen on using a new system at first, but now they trust it and wouldn’t want to go back.”

Processing much, much faster
Video 2000 draws heavily on the Greentree financial system and has very specific business requirements. Because of the high volume of data, processing and analysis of reports in CBA, for each of the 100 stores, there were speed issues.

These complex financial reporting structures, budget modelling and transaction-entry files were streamlined using Greentree’s Excel reporting tool.

Finance controller John Rashleigh says the biggest impact has been on the processing of the company’s 1,400-plus AP invoices every month.

“Excel is without doubt the biggest bonus. 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. This avoids manually keying in high volumes 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, with Greentree’s Excel integration greatly reducing demands on staff time. Rashleigh says of the time savings, “We’re impressed by the Excel integration and have greatly leveraged this function.

“Monthly reporting has been reduced from one-and-a-half days to around four hours, for over 80 reports. The monthly report run now takes around four hours compared with a week using CBA.”

Rashleigh says management of GST has also been alleviated. “Recording and processing GST now takes five minutes compared with 30 minutes before. Greentree saves us having to manually report GST a couple of times a month.”

Streamlined sales reports
One specific requirement Video 2000 had of Greentree was that it could better manage the huge flow of data generated as a result of all the sales reports sent from each store to headquarters.

Greentree needed to be able to streamline the importing of this sales information so as to give the management team true sales figures instantly in the general ledger.

“Now we just go and pick a store to run a report on, rather than having to do a full run,” says Brent.

Commenting on the support team, he adds, “We’ve had no problems with the support or the quality of the customisations. The ability to get customisations done at a reasonable cost is an advantage of working with the Greentree team.”

Analysis trees
Video 2000 is a heavy user of Greentree’s user-defined transaction analysis trees, which allows the company them to group 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, making the data a lot more manageable, particularly when it’s needed to produce a balance sheet or a monthly per-store profit and loss report. This powerful feature means the management team can easily tailor many of the standard Greentree reports and can then summarise the resulting financial information within Excel.

Previously, in CBA, the company was using over 30,000 general ledger accounts for all its stores. “The big attraction for us was to simplify our chart of accounts. Greentree’s transaction trees have helped our ‘multi-branch’ system.

Maintaining the chart based on this set-up is so simple now there are only 1,000 general ledger accounts in Greentree,” says Rashleigh.

Greentree is obviously keeping good pace with Video 2000’s growth, “Greentree is doing everything it needs to do. We aim to continue streamlining our processes and speeding up reporting.

“Greentree’s automation and integration has relieved us of all the manual processes, saving both staff time and costs,” concludes Brent.





> Greentree International
Graham Hill
P: 0800 313 313
F: 09 366 3889
E: graham.hill@greentree.com
W: www.greentree.com






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