When choosing a financial system back in 2011, Cooper & Co took their lead from other local Harcourts’ franchisees and adopted Xero. And all was well and good for a while. Until it wasn’t.
Renee Jordaan, Cooper & Co’s Finance Manager, explains. “As part of our business strategy, we regularly review our systems and processes — and this included re-evaluating our financial software. Xero had started to fail us due to our data volumes, and we had to find a workaround to buy us some time. But even that didn’t work long term. Once we could no longer produce GST returns through Xero and had to create them manually, the writing really was on the wall. Even Xero advised us that our volumes far exceeded their target market, and that we needed to find another accounting software provider before everything failed.”
So, the search was on.
The problem with reporting
Jordaan’s extensive list of non-negotiable features for a new finance application started with consolidated reporting.