As a fast-growing company, Source UPS were looking for an application to support their business and put the foundations in place to control their rapidly growing operations.

Source UPS was founded by Gavin Banks in 2009. The company started out as an Uninterruptible Power Supplies specialist. The business grew quickly and today is supplying everything from backup power for a desktop PC to entire infrastructure solutions for data centres.

Growing Pains

Source UPS is typical of many growing businesses. The simple systems initially used for producing quotes, processing orders and creating invoices were completely adequate. But, over time, as additional products were introduced and new services offered, the existing systems began to creak.

Source UPS was running four different systems

“In many instances, we’d have to re-key the same information four times”, Gavin recalled. “Quotes were produced in Word, when accepted an Order was produced in Xero, a maintenance document was created separately and customer details were entered into the accounting system.”

Using four different systems meant that each stage of the process took a lot of time re-keying the same information. This gave plenty of instances for errors to occur with parts of information missing or incorrect.

It was immensely difficult to be in full control and have an accurate overview of the business with the information held all over the place.

Workhorse was built to replicate the operational flow of Source UPS

“Meeting Alastair Badman, founder of Workhorse was extremely timely”, said Gavin. “We’d evaluated 2 or 3 CRM systems, but none of them provided everything we required. We couldn’t customise them as we wanted, which meant we’d have to adapt our operations to suit the software, something we weren’t prepared to do.”

Workhorse was built to replicate the operational flow of Source UPS. As it was trialled there were a few tweaks to be made, which were updated either immediately or within 24 hours.

How Workhorse helped Source UPS

Quotes can be produced quickly because product and service information is stored within Workhorse and can be populated into the quote immediately. Quotes are converted to orders with just one click. One more click and the relevant information is in the accounting system, Xero.

“Having all the processes and information in one place, plus the integration to Xero, saves us a huge amount of time, every day.”

Improved customer service

Apart from the turnaround of quotes being much faster, Source UPS can now answer maintenance queries immediately.

Previously, if a customer called with a question about one of their products under maintenance, a member staff would have to call back having delved through several documents to find the answer. Now the information is on the screen as they speak and the answer can be provided immediately.

“The bespoke module for maintenance contracts has made a massive difference. Customer notes are instantly visible; no more referring back to spreadsheets.”

How we helped Taxmag

Tagmax had been relying on multiple systems and spreadsheets that were disconnected and clunky. Workhorse’s centralised system streamlined the business with meaningful functionality and data.