Michael Burton's company, laboratory supplies distributor Davidson & Hardy, had been using the same finance, purchasing and stock system since the eighties. It was a nightmare.

At Davidson & Hardy, the lab supplies firm where I’m FD, we didn’t have great communications with our suppliers because of its shortcomings.

Purchase invoice processing was a bottleneck. And as for dealing with customers over the internet – no way! It got to the stage where we weren’t able to focus on our jobs.

In 2004 we decided to invest in a completely new system. We knew it needed to be a top-of-the-range suite, as our 30 people were handling 100,000 products, 2,000 customers and 400 suppliers.

Some companies call in external consultants, visit shows and run beauty parades of different suppliers to find what they need.

Barney Purce, the MD, and myself took a different approach. We did all our research on the internet.

We hit upon SAP’s Business One software, an all-in-one application covering finance, purchasing, stock control and sales. With its easy-to-join tables, ready to capture any kind of data you fancy, it was head and shoulders above the competition.

In the nineties SAP earned a reputation for huge, sprawling enterprise software projects that seemed to take forever to complete. But it’s done a good job of reinventing itself.

The Business One package, aimed specifically at small and mid-sized businesses, arrived at Davidson & Hardy in September and was up and running three months later – a relatively fast rollout for a comprehensive suite.

Just as important, the price tag suits the market – £16,000 for the software, with a further £8,000 developing web-ordering capability.

The rollout was virtually problem- free. One issue to watch for is SAP’s Data Transfer Workbench, which imports data from Excel.

It can only handle 10,000 fields at a time, while Excel spreadsheets can handle 64,000 – so it might take several passes to get your data across. And if you do trade overseas, be aware that foreign sales get logged in a separate account.

But this is nitpicking compared with the magic Business One has worked on Davidson & Hardy’s accounting. Now income goes onto the balance sheet as soon as our salespeople make a sale.

Sounds simple, but it makes all the difference in the world. If you get the quotation right, then you get the sales order right. That becomes your delivery note, and that becomes your invoice. You don’t have to do any more number punching.

Similarly, a purchase order gets turned into a goods receipt, which gets turned into a purchase invoice.

The system has cut admin time dramatically, solving our purchase invoice problems – even though we doubled the number of items on our stock ledger to 200,000 when we took on a new supplier last year.

Business One also provides accurate financial information to the four directors (managing, finance, purchasing and sales), a must for a distribution business that makes its profit from the discount it receives from suppliers.

And in the warehouse, dispatch reports can be pulled off as needed, rather than being done in one big batch overnight – another plus given that some customers want deliveries shipped in as little as four hours.

Finally, Davidson & Hardy can provide a web ordering capability to selected clients.

Thanks to some custom development work, the system can display different prices for each customer depending on what long-term deals they have, and the type and volume of product they order.

Getting that data straight into the system saves time, prevents rekeying – and looks smart.

All of which has allowed my fellow directors and our salespeople to focus on what matters. The tiresome number crunching and system maintenance which used to eat up days and weeks of our time is a thing of the past.

My job has changed too. I’ve got all the facts I need at my fingertips, and I’m now free to concentrate on the front-end of the company, which, I suppose, is the biggest endorsement I can give Business One.

Related tags: sap business one, purchase orders, purchase invoice processing, import data, dispatch reports, technology in business, accounting,