Mortgage Choice Limited

Founded in 1999, Mortgage Choice Limited is an independent financial services broker, providing total mortgage solutions in the Northamptonshire area. With 34 employees and a turnover of £1.5 million, the company has grown from strength to strength in its 5 years of operation.

For Mortgage Choice, customer service is the key differentiating factor. Giving high-quality, up to the minute advice is critical in this highly competitive sector; and this is why all the company's forward-facing staff hold the full certificate in mortgage advice and practise, in compliance with the Regulated Mortgage Code.

Until early 2004, the company relied on a 2-user Sage Line 50 solution. However, continuing expansion placed this system under increasing strain, as Sarah Robinson (Accounts Manager) explains: "an increased volume of transactions meant our old system simply couldn't cope. We raised the issue with our IT suppliers, and they introduced us to Access Accounts."

This recommendation was made by a local Access Specialist Centre. Previously, the centre had focused on maintaining Mortgage Choice's database, but it was quick to highlight the benefits of switching to SQL-based 'Client/Server' accounting software. Access was evaluated alongside Sage Line 100 and chosen because of its superior adaptability and depth of analysis.

Because it is based around Microsoft's free 'MSDE' version of SQL Server, Dimensions Lite helps to reduce the cost of Client/Server accounting. Sarah confirms, "Dimensions Lite came within our budget and this was a pleasant surprise, given its much more powerful database. And when we analysed cost against performance, the benefits of the MSDE database became clear."

Sage and Access were run in parallel for two months until March 2004 when the handover was completed. An Access data utility - Transaction Broker - was used to transfer the bulk of the legacy data into Dimensions Lite.

One of the major criteria for the new system was greater speed, flexibility and depth of analysis. In particular the company needed to consolidate its own accounts with those for two other members of the group; a process which, prior to Access, was entirely dependent on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Data was exported from Sage, then consolidated and manipulated in Excel, before being presented to the board. With so much data needing to be manually re-grouped in the P&L, this was a frustrating and time-consuming process.

However, Mortgage Choice soon discovered that it wasn't necessary to export data into Excel - with some quick and easy customisation to its in-built Crystal reporting, Dimensions Lite was able to meet all the company's consolidation needs. The time taken to carry this process subsequently reduced, by an average of 4 hours per month.

Crystal reporting has also helped Mortgage Choice to deal with growing transaction volumes without a corresponding increase in staff. Individually, it is now averaging around 250 transactions a week, while the group as a whole generates up to 4,000 transactions per month. This represents a substantial increase on previous years, but Sarah says that "every aspect of the group's reporting is now much quicker than ever before."