Sage PFW Provides Clean Sweep for Coast To Coast, Inc.
Coast To Coast, Inc., a San Clemente, California-based cleaning contractor, provides full-service cleaning and maintenance services to many of the nation’s retail apparel chains, including: Guess, Lucky Brands, and Foot Locker through a network of local subcontractors.
But despite the company’s successes, trying to manage a nationwide network of subcontractors while maintaining growth, and the administrative work that comes with it, was becoming an increasing challenge.
Spotless Solution
“When you’re spending more time moving paper across your desk than generating new business, something’s really wrong,” says Bob Hancock, president of Coast To Coast. “I wanted to invest in a solution for the longer term. We needed business management software that was state of the art-one dynamic and flexible enough to meet our needs.
”When a local business partner demonstrated Sage PFW ERP for Coast To Coast, Hancock knew he had found that solution. “It clicked right away. Our reseller immediately understood what we were trying to do, and showed us how Sage PFW could work for us".
Cleaning House
After Coast To Coast’s subcontractors perform their services at the stores, they send a work order to Coast To Coast requesting payment. Coast To Coast uses that work order to create a customer invoice and a payable invoice to the vendor. Ensuring each work order was billed at the correct rate and each vendor paid at the right rate, required two-and-a-half work days every week. Coast To Coast’s business partner took a simple, yet ingenious approach to the problem. By setting up Coast To Coast’s service offerings as inventory items, both the price and the cost of the service are easily stored and maintained. A separate set of items is maintained for each customer, allowing Coast To Coast to vary both the cost, which is dependent on the vendor, and the price, which may vary by customer.
“We’re saving at least 16 personhours a week, while at the same time doing 65 percent more business than before.”
Two new fields added to the invoice-form hold the vendor identification number and the work order number. A report is run each week, isolating invoices dated within the week. The report includes the vendor identification number, vendor work order number, and the calculated cost of the items on the invoice. The staff simply enters the accounts payable invoices from this conveniently formatted report.
With Sage PFW, Coast To Coast has realized impressive efficiency gains and greatly reduced the processing time required each week. “We’re saving at least 16 person-hours a week, while at the same time doing 65 percent more business than before,” reports Hancock.
“We’d simply be buried in paperwork without Sage PFW,” says Hancock. “With 500 subcontractors and over 1,000 work orders a week, we’d do nothing but play catch-up.”
Using Sage PFW, Hancock says the company could easily double, even triple in size without the need to add staff.
Better Business Decisions
Hancock says he now has more time to work on his business. In addition to simplifying billing and payables processing, Sage PFW provides Coast To Coast with informative reports about sales and cost of goods sold, plus better overall security than the old entrylevel system offered.
Sales and inventory reports detail the services sold by customer and by period, and include the profit amount and percentage for each. Analytical information like this helps Hancock make informed decisions about how to price his company’s services.
Reports and inquiries within the Accounts Payable module allow Coast To Coast to monitor the business it does with each subcontractor, including open transactions and historical data.
Integration with the Bank Book module speeds the monthly reconciliation process.
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