North of England property developer say Zahara “helped us gain control of our purchasing”.
Like so many innovative and rapidly growing companies, the client’s financial processes didn’t always look as good as their award-winning homes. The company was running multiple projects across numerous sites, each with a range of sub-contractors and suppliers.
The project managers emailed orders to suppliers without budget approvals and relied on manually approving paper based invoices. Each invoice required approval by the Managing Director prior to payment, which could result in disputes with suppliers and delayed payments. The team recognised the importance of finding a solution to their purchasing requirements.
Finance System Used
The client found Zahara easy to use across their business. Each of the 19 business units required Zahara to be configured differently to align budget codes and nominals, suppliers, sub-contractors and approvals workflows.
The company maintains project budgets, tracks ‘cost to complete’ is in line with forecast, enforces the use of purchase orders and loves Zahara’s multi-level approvals workflow. With POs and receipts nicely automated, the finance team have removed the pressure on the MD to approve purchase invoices – the Zahara workflow ensured that only pre-approved invoices were sent to the client’s accounting software and for payment.
The accounts team now have clarity over every transaction and a central repository of reconciled and approved orders and invoices. The company has dramatically reduced off contract or unbudgeted expenditure and has fine grained transparency of every purchase across every site. Disputes with suppliers have all but disappeared.
With so many deliveries, from multiple sites and different suppliers, Zahara has enabled the client to make sure the right goods are delivered on time, every time. As a result, project profitability has increased and administration has been significantly reduced.
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