Growing 17% YOY without increasing COGS

How Total Hardware transformed its operations and grew 17% YOY without increasing COGS

45 mins

to complete payroll (previously a whole day)

1 day

a week saved chasing inventory

17%

increase in turnover with no increase in COGS

"Wiise has transformed our business. We’ve been able to increase turnover 17% without any increase in COGS. We can see all our stock in real time and make far better decisions about the products we sell."

Trudy Bownds, Purchasing and Operations Manager at Total Hardware

Before Wiise

No way of tracking inventory – across 5 different warehouses.

4 hours to run a single BAS report.

Landed costs and GST completed using a hand-held calculator.

Payroll, leave management and other key functions managed using Excel spreadsheets.

Limited by transactions, with regular system crashes and only one user at a time able to access Quickbooks.

With Wiise

Always-accurate inventory data that’s automatically updated every time an order is processed.

See highly detailed reports, such as product profitability in just a few clicks.

Automated reconciliations and payroll calculations.

A single cloud-based system to manage the entire business, from anywhere on any device.

Unlimited transactions and no more system crashes or delays.

Trudy Bownds from Total Hardware
Trudy Bownds

Purchasing and Operations Manager at Total Hardware

Meet Trudy. Trudy is the Purchasing and Operations Manager at Total Hardware and has played a key role in helping it grow from humble beginnings in a home garage, to a company with more than 30 staff, 2,500 products and five warehouses across the country.

With ten years of 17% year-on-year growth and 390,000 monthly transactions flowing through the business, the operations team was desperately trying to keep up using systems that weren’t built for this kind of scale.

Trudy recalls one weekend that marked the final straw. The Quickbooks software that the team had been using was struggling to keep up with the volume of transactions, regularly crashing and only allowing one user at a time to access the system. It was time to change.

Growing pains

What started as frustration with slow software, quickly escalated into a major impact on Total Hardware's team as their business grew:

  • Chasing inventory: With no way of tracking inventory across all their warehouses, Trudy was spending an entire day each week calling warehouses to check for items. Staff would then have to physically check for items, while customers waited on another line. It was incredibly time-consuming, and customers were receiving a poor experience.
  • Reporting nightmare: Despite having a Quickbooks subscription that included finance and inventory management, most processes relied on manual data entry and updates – from product pricing to payroll. Busy team members would often waste several hours a day just to complete basic tasks like a BAS report and were manually keying in data and wading through spreadsheets to find the information they needed.
  • Working on weekends: without the right tools, sales teams had to manually apply special customer pricing to each order, and manually update prices over weekends every time there was a pricing change. Worse, with only one user being able to access the system at a given time, some staff members had no choice but to complete tasks in the system after-hours.
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The Wiise solution

With significant tolls on business performance and team morale, the decision was made to invest in all-in-one cloud software that they'd never outgrow.

"‘For us it was important to get a system we could grow with, rather than something we would grow out of.’" - Lee Rogers, the Finance and Admin Manager

After a smooth implementation, Trudy’s team now works from the same, cloud-based Wiise ERP platform – and life at Total Hardware is very different.

“Chasing inventory was a nightmare. I had to put customers on hold to frantically call warehouses to find stock. We rarely did stocktake because I needed all the warehouses to complete it at the same time. With Wiise, we know where all our inventory is, and we can quickly respond to customers.”

Wiise’s native Microsoft Office 365 integration also enables the team to work seamlessly between their favourite tools (like Excel and Teams) while keeping all critical business data safe, secure, accessible and accurate (with automatic updates on stock and purchase information).

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Supporting growth 

According to Trudy and Lee, implementing Wiise has been a game-changer for Total Hardware. Their implementation partner Cloud Factory helped them to resolve operation challenges and ensured there was minimal disruption to Total Hardware's clients and orders during implementation.

The team now benefits from: 

  • Faster reconciliations: With integrated bank feeds.
  • Rapid reporting: Reporting can now be done in a few minutes (previously four hours).
  • Automated workflows: Giving staff more time to work on strategic tasks.
  • Real-time inventory: Able to see inventory across five warehouses in three different states.
  • Accurate landed costs: Ability to adjust prices according to true cost of goods and maintain margins by accurately calculating landed costs.
  • Improved cash flow: Process orders faster, invoice on the go, ship items quickly and improve cash flow.
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The payoff

Massive time savings

With automatic payroll calculations, bank feeds and real time access to data across the whole business, the team have reduced payroll from a day to forty-five minutes, and reporting time from four hours to just a few minutes.

Increased profitability

The team can now see accurate inventory records across five warehouses in real time, improving profitability and saving Trudy a whole day each week.

Flexibility

The team has access to Wiise at any time, from anywhere. Sales reps can invoice on the go and the team can adapt to changes in supply or demand as they occur.

"The accessibility of Wiise has been fantastic. Our sales reps can produce invoices on the go, and we can keep track of sample stock they give to customers. It keeps our team accountable, and everything is updated in real time."

Trudy Bownds, Purchasing and Operations Manager at Total Hardware

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