How Cripps & Co. Achieved A 60% Faster Month-End Close in Just 30 Days
June 11, 2024
Within 30-days, Gail Dillon, Deputy Financial Controller from Cripps & Co, explains how her team managed to cut down the time spent on their inter-company month end process by over 60% across the 15-entity business.
Cripps & Co is a family business founded in 1990, specialising in restoring beautiful old barns and walled gardens for weddings and events.
Before Mayday, the finance team struggled with a painful, time-consuming cycle of manually recharging and managing intercompany loans across their 15 entities each month.
Trapped in this tedious cycle, the team at Cripps & Co. felt frustrated – until their trusted advisors, Bishop Fleming, recommended a game-changing solution that ushered in a new era of multi-entity month-end bliss.
Here’s their story.
The challenges
Like for many multi-entity businesses, month end at Cripps felt like a massive undertaking, fuelled by frustration and a huge drain on time and resources.
3 key challenges they faced were:
- The time-consuming process of reconciling transactions between the multiple companies.
- The manual headache in reviewing each nominal code and processing transactions across the 15 interacting entities.
- The high risk of human error when manually entering data, leading to discrepancies that were difficult to trace and resolve.
Gail commented, “month end was time-consuming and painful. Real pressure for change was building as the directors were always demanding quicker reports, which posed a real challenge given the manual processes involved. I would feel like pulling my hair out when I had a tight deadline to meet and the reconciliations did not match up. Finding discrepancies was like searching for a needle in a haystack.”
However, despite the building internal pressure, Cripps was not actively seeking a new solution. The painful cycle of reconciling, recharging and managing intercompany loans on Xero was all they knew, and they accepted it as “business as usual”.
The turning point
Cripps were not aware of a better way, until their accounting software advisors, Bishop Fleming proactively reached out to them.
Gail recalls, “What impressed me most was that we were not working on a specific project with Bishop Fleming at the time. They had previously been our company's auditors and helped set up our management reporting software, so they understood our business well.
So, when James Darby reached out to share that he’d found a new platform that would be perfect for our business, I was beyond impressed.
It went to show that Bishop Fleming genuinely cares for and considers the unique needs of each of their clients - and it was a true testament to the strong relationship we had built.
The introduction to Mayday has genuinely revolutionised how we manage month end at Cripps & Co and we will always be grateful to Bishop Fleming for that.”
James Darby, a digital services specialist at Bishop Fleming, commented, “At Bishop Fleming, we take pride in truly understanding the unique needs and challenges of each of our clients. When we saw the pain that Cripps & Co. were experiencing with their multi-entity month-end processes, we knew that we had to introduce them to Mayday. This is a shining example of the value that we strive to deliver by staying attuned to our clients' evolving needs and leveraging innovative tools like Mayday.”
Based on the credibility of the introduction, Gail thought it was a no-brainer she would test Mayday’s free 30-day trial. And almost instantly her team experienced value from the platform.
10/10 onboarding and support
“I always measure a product based on the quality of support. Mayday had a comprehensive library of online resources that were really useful in getting me started, but it was the 1-1 support that blew me away,” Gail noted.
“I was offered bespoke onboarding and together with David from Mayday I quickly set up recharge rules and explored how we could quickly and easily do intercompany balances.”
Having the Mayday team readily available, responding to queries in minutes (not hours), enabled Cripps & Co. to quickly innovate their month-end processes before their 30-day trial was up.
Life after Mayday
What was once a manual and arduous process, is now streamlined, automated and efficient. With time reduced by 60% to just 0.5 days per month spent on month-end processes, the finance team can now focus on more strategic tasks.
“The user interface is very simple and easy to use and being able to see what both sides have in terms of postings on one screen is an absolute game changer,” says Gail.
“Instead of continually switching between 15+ different Xero companies and using spreadsheets like before, with Mayday’s Balancer I can now click into Mayday and see that everything is in balance - and if it’s not, quickly find where the discrepancies are! It’s very satisfying - I love using it!”
She goes on to note, “then there’s Mayday’s Recharger that automatically redirects our intercompany recharges. What was previously a long process that we would dread, now happens automatically.”
The time savings from using Mayday have drastically freed up the team, allowing them to focus on other tasks, such as producing timely reports for the directors. Other key stakeholders, such as the Finance Director Consultant, have been "ecstatic" with the improved reporting accuracy, faster decision-making, and increased productivity as a result of using the platform.
Gail said, “What’s wild is that we’ve only been using Mayday for 2-months, so I have no doubt we will continue to automate and cut down our month end processes further by using the platform.”
Final thoughts for multi-entity businesses using Xero
“Try Mayday. And try it today. There’s literally no risk in trying the platform and you’ll find it easy to set up and use. We can’t believe what month end looked like before using Mayday and are incredibly grateful we were introduced to them. I can’t recommend Mayday highly enough!”
For more information, you can start a free 30-day trial or book a demo and one of the team will show you the ropes.
