Neale Dataday

Neale Dataday Ltd has been publishing and manufacturing quality diaries and social stationery for more than 150 years, ever since the young Queen Victoria began her reign. It was then that Thomas John Smith and his elder brother Joseph formed the T.J. & J Smith partnership to manufacture fine diaries, almanacs, quill pens and metallic papers. From humble beginnings in the City of London, the company’s brands have become world famous.

The company’s head office and 40,000 sq ft factory are located on Canvey Island, Essex. It is here that sales and production staff work closely together to ensure that Dataday and Leathersmith of London retain their reputations as brand names which are synonymous with the very best in British craftsmanship.

Neale Dataday employs around seventy staff and has a turnover of £4 million. Sales to retail outlets are carried out by a team of agents servicing mainland United Kingdom, the Channel Islands and Northern Ireland. These agents are supported by a sales team at the Canvey Island headquarters. ‘Leathersmith of London’ first entered the North American market in 1947 and since then sales have been developed through an international network of distributors across many countries in the world.

Demands of both the corporate export and retail sector are met through the ‘Leathersmith of London’ and ‘Dataday’ brands respectively. The central finance department, based at Canvey Island, administrates product sales across all brands. Over the last decade the company has invested in modern technology. However, the accounting system, Picas 1, was becoming very dated and offered very limited functionality. Hardware and software support was £10,000 per annum and rising. Together with limitations on its reporting capabilities, it was very difficult to use. This meant that, over time, only two people in the company were able to use it.<br>
The hardware was becoming very unreliable and repairs were becoming more and more expensive. The company had to rely upon one person to run the important accounting aspects, with no one else able to do this. The new owners, a North American distributor, felt this was unacceptable and it was considered impractical to train more staff to use the old system compared with other technologies available.

Initial research into the software market was conducted by IT manager David Baillie who collated independent product reviews published in the trade and consumer computer magazines such as ‘PC Pro’. Working from a draft shortlist produced from these reviews, Baillie conducted supplementary research by speaking to suppliers and attending trade shows. During the Windows Show, an annual exhibition attracting over fifty thousand visitors to London’s Olympia, Baillie received a demonstration of one desktop system that offered a range of integrated accounting modules designed for Windows-based personal computers. This was of immediate interest to Baillie because he recognised the potential benefits such a system could offer to users over and above character based software.

Baillie said: “As well as all the usual accounting functions, including sales order processing (SOP) and purchase order processing (POP), we also had a future requirement for one feature that could only be found in one Windows accounts system that was affordable.” Due to a change in the way that retail products were to be administrated, Neale Dataday required the facility to track stock lines as assemblies. Growing complexity of manufacture involved in most products meant control of quantities and value relating to component parts had to be increased. Therefore, stock control software had to be in some way linked to sales orders so that repetitive and unnecessary data entry into more than one database could be avoided. The solution within budget was found in the desktop system Baillie had seen at the show six months earlier.

The main selection criteria were ease of use, rich functionality and performance. The system had to allow more than one user on to the system and perform data entry, reporting or both whenever they chose. Baillie said: “The main attraction of Access Accounts was cost and that it was Windows-based. But it also satisfied our main selection criteria which were ease of use, rich functionality, performance and good Drill Down.”

Installation and implementation were undertaken over a period of four months. Baillie captured accounts data from the previous system into a spreadsheet and, using the import utility he bought as part of the new system, transferred current and historic data. It was decided to run both systems side by side for two months, to test and prove that the new system had accepted all legacy data correctly and that fresh data entries were being posted as intended. Baillie said: “All in all, the transition went without too much trouble especially considering we were three months into our financial year when we went live with our new system. Mind you, I would have preferred an easier to use import utility.

The key benefits have been the ability for anyone of a number of users to be able to get access to information they require. Baillie said: “We have greatly reduced the support costs for the accounts department and getting at detailed information is now much easier although we do find the system weak on orders and sales reporting at the stock item level compared to the custom reports on Picas.”

Baillie said: “Implementing Access Accounts has meant that more people now have access to information pertinent to their requirements. We have the option to increase the system with other modules or move up to the client/server version in the future, whenever we want, depending on the growth of the company.”