“Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury spent hours every week processing cheque payments, until it discovered Transaction Journal.”
“I was spending 18 hours a week processing the cheques that we receive. Now I spend just 1 hour doing the same work.”
Roy Morey
Proprietor
Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury
Wiltshire Farm Foods is the UK’s leading meal delivery service and is trusted by thousands to deliver quality food and a little bit of independence to their door every week. After the meals are carefully prepared and frozen at the Trowbridge headquarters, the network of franchise outlets take over, delivering to their local customers and forging long term relationships with them. Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury is one such outlet that began trading in 1992. For many, Wiltshire Farm Foods offers a way to continue to eat well, without long arduous trips to the supermarket. A large percentage of this market is elderly and a great deal of them like to pay by cheque, the form of payment that they are most comfortable with.
A large percentage of Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury’s payments arrive in cheque form. In the past, Roy Morey, Proprietor of Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury took personal responsibility for processing them due to their financial significance and to spare productive staff members from the mechanical task of recording each transaction in spread sheets. Morey says: “I was spending 6 hours, 3 times a week, just processing the cheques we received. I was also double checking every transaction in order to catch and correct as many of the inevitable human errors as possible.”
Reclaiming management time
When the volume of cheques processed rose to yet a new high in 2011, Morey decided a new solution was required to recover his valuable time from the process while maintaining the high level of accuracy.
Solchar was able to offer Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury the perfect solution. In December 2011, Solchar provided a demonstration of the Transaction Journal system. During the week long demo Morey became convinced that Transaction Journal was the right solution and a system was installed in January 2012.
Morey says: “Since implementing Transaction Journal, I now spend just 20 minutes at a time processing cheques, a saving of 17 hours per week. The system is so accurate that I could delegate the task, but I choose to continue doing it as it is actually enjoyable now it is so fast.”
A simple solution
The Transaction Journal system specified for Wiltshire Farm Foods is a single user installation, with a Canon imageFORMULA CR-50 high speed cheque scanner connected to a combined Client and Database Server. The CR-50 was specified as it is a dedicated cheque scanner that offers a high through-put speed of 50 cheques per minute in a compact and reliable device. This matched the requirement Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury had for a high volume of cheques to be processed quickly at a single Transaction Journal workstation.
Morey says: “Installation was very smooth and completed within one day. After that, Solchar trained me to use the system and scanner in just a couple of hours and I must say it is ridiculously easy to use.”
After each batch of cheques has been processed, Transaction Journal produces a complete Proof of Deposit to accompany the cheques to the bank. Both Wiltshire Farm Foods and the bank benefit from the automated speed and accuracy of Transaction Journal. The lack of errors saves time and money for everyone.
Perfectly suited
Wiltshire Farm Foods were looking for an affordable way to reduce the amount of management time spent processing cheques and Solchar offered the perfect solution. Their Transaction Journal system can be seamlessly scaled to support a single user installation, like the one at Wiltshire Farm Foods Newbury, and multi-user networked systems alike.
“The major driver was definitely to remove the burden of cheque processing from my shoulders” concludes Morey “but the benefits have been far greater. Solchar definitely offer the best value for money of any of the providers I could find. Transaction Journal and Solchar really do what they promise; save you time and save you money.”