“We‘re now able to look at which areas we should develop and which areas aren‘t delivering the best returns. Greentree has sharpened our pencil.”Mandy Philpott is the Financial Controller for Bronx Engineering, a market leader in the design and management of coil-processing lines, bespoke equipment and levelling technology. It provides tailor-made solutions in the production of steel and aluminium for companies worldwide. Greentree has brought a new era of efficiency.Production lines are complex and expensive things to design and install. Bronx struck trouble when support lapsed for its accounting and administration system.“We were living on the edge, but we took the risk and kept using it for a while because I suppose we were afraid of change,” Mandy recalls.The system made just about every regular task a time-wasting ordeal. Data entry from printed reports into Excel spreadsheets meant that a requirement such as a trial balance could take two days to produce, because of the need to double-check every account. Job costing was equally tedious, with the need to list all purchase orders and costs against each job.Analysis of debtors and creditors would take at least a day each month, as did the preparation of VAT returns. Certain people in the company had devised their own methods for doing such tasks, but when they left or retired, their knowledge departed with them.After scraping along for a spell, Bronx went looking for a replacement. Greentree was assessed, along with other products including Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Sage, but the staff vote in favour of Greentree was all but unanimous.“Out of all of them, Greentree stood out as the most transparent,” Mandy says. “The out-of-the-box solution met our business needs.”Greentree helped Bronx‘s staff to overcome their fear of change. “One of the beauties of Greentree is that it‘s allowed people to move on with relative ease,” says Mandy. “We found it very user-friendly.”Greentree has made many of those time-consuming tasks much simpler.“We wanted on-screen job costing, to enable more efficient reporting and analysis,” Mandy says. “Greentree has ticked all those boxes for us.”Debtor and creditor analysis is now available at the click of a button, while the time taken on VAT returns has been slashed to a couple of hours a month. Producing and dispatching an invoice is now a single, smooth process. Paperwork has been significantly reduced; audit reports are simply loaded into Excel or PDFs and emailed to the auditors.“With Greentree I can now drill down to get the information I need with a few clicks,” says Mandy. “Previously I‘d have to follow a paper trail from cupboard to cupboard.”Greentree‘s analytical capabilities have cleared a better path for business development. Bronx has also been impressed by how easy it was to adapt the system to new demands.“Our Managing Director wanted to see a breakdown of performance in the various sectors of our business,” Mandy says. “It seemed a daunting task to make what seemed like major changes in order to produce such reports. In fact, it only took us a couple of days.”“That’s another great thing about Greentree: its flexibility. It‘s easy to accommodate change.”The information delivered by Greentree has enabled Bronx to examine the profit margins of both customers and products. “We‘re now able to focus our energy on the areas that deliver better returns,” says Mandy.Real-time information is now available on spare parts and sales, as well as finance. and customer history.Greentree has brought major (and welcome) changes for Mandy‘s role. “I‘m no longer just an accountant,” she says, “I‘m a commercial manager as well. I can handle all the financials, as well as placing orders for contracts, and managing purchase orders and spares.“Greentree enables us to do the same jobs with fewer people, and has made us more efficient as a team.”As Bronx opens new manufacturing facilities and seeks fresh markets, it‘s confident that Greentree is capable of handling whatever happens next.“It‘s marvellous to know that the system is not static,” Mandy concludes. “We know that our business and Greentree can grow together.“We‘ll be going hand-in-hand into the future.”