Northeast Press Ltd.

Founded in 1849, Northeast Press has a portfolio of twenty one regional and local newspapers with a powerful combination of paid-for dailies, paid-for weeklies and high quality, editorially led free newspapers. Covering over five counties, ranging from Scottish border country in the North to the estuary of the River Tees in the county of Cleveland in the South, Northeast Press titles reach over 1 million readers every week.

When the production system for advertising changed, Northeast Press went shopping for a true Windows accounts package that could integrate the two processes together.

Having researched all the trade magazines and reviews in the accounting press a delegation of managers visited Access Accounting Ltd. “It was the ability to consolidate all our sub ledgers into one and the functionality of Recurring Journals in the Nominal Ledger that sold us Access Accounts. That it is straightforward to use and has well structured Drill Down functionality was a bonus. Plus it was competitively priced”, said Financial Controller Steven Thompson.

Northeast Press has been operating Access Accounts since 1995. Its network includes 400 Macintosh workstations that use its huge £4 million DPS Desk Top Publishing system specific to newspapers. From this system an output file is created which is transferred into Access Accounts to create new Customer Accounts and Sales Orders. These orders are saved into a 'batch' in the Access Sales Order Processing module from where they can be amended or saved and invoices generated. Northeast Press has so far processed over 2 million detail lines through Access Accounts.

Key Benefits

Access Accounts was the only serious option available that could offer a real Windows-based package available for both Windows and Macintosh 32 bit workstations. Having a heavy orientation toward Macintosh & PowerPC computers this factor was crucial to Northeast Press.

“The Access Accounting dealer assisted with the integration of third party applications most efficiently,” added Steven Thompson. “Great flexibility and easy data retrieval are the key features provided by Access Accounting Ltd. When they operate within a major cross-platform environment like the newspaper industry they enable us to improve the utilisation of staff. It is quite clear we have acquired a very powerful product. We have thirty two users who find the Access system far more efficient and accurate than the old hat system we had previously. The software is very powerful.”