Hegashall Limited (www.hegashall.co.uk) is a successful fresh vegetable wholesaler located in the heart of Birmingham. It traded in the Birmingham Wholesale Market in Pershore Street for over 40 years and has recently completed the move into brand new purpose built premises at The Hub in Witton just outside the city centre a stone’s throw from the Aston Villa Football ground.
Hegashall import directly from Europe’s finest growers including Wiskerke Onions and Haluco BV in Holland and SAT Hortofruticola Mabe (www.mabesat.com) and Agrasa Agricola Aguilena in Spain together with many premium British growers across the UK.
Hegashall began using Sage 50 Accounts back in the 1990’s to process its day to day sales and purchase transactions. After years of painstaking manual stock processing, Hegashall began using Freshmetrics (www.freshmetrics.eu) a customised fresh produce stock control system designed by the Birmingham software developer Freshmetrics Limited with a Sage importer tool designed by Sage 50 developer Price Bailey Limited which enabled them to grow their business to an £8.7 million turnover in 2017.
Hegashall’s Sales Director Joe Redden contacted Jayne following a major hardware disaster which left their Sage 50 Accounts data completely corrupted. With no Sage Cover technical support in place, Hegashall’s accounts processing came to a grinding halt.
Their Sage 50 Accounts system would not even produce an Aged Debtors or Aged Creditors listing without crashing and despite using all of the Sage 50 Accounts recovery tools, no immediate solution was available and called for a rather radical approach to getting them back up and running.
A robust Sage 50 Payroll and Sage HR solution was chosen for this leading Birmingham business
Jayne contacted Sage UK Limited and purchased a new company licence on Hegashall’s behalf as she had discovered that their Sage 50 Accounts system would allow the sales and purchase account records to be exported to Excel. Within the hour, a new accounts dataset had been setup with these records successfully imported to give a base for re-building their accounts system manually. Thankfully the corrupted dataset would allow an Aged Debtors and Creditors report to be run individually for each account so although this was time consuming, outstanding invoices from both ledgers were added line by line until the new dataset was complete with a new Sales and Purchase Ledger. This just left the Nominal Ledger and VAT system to be brought up to date. As Hegashall had been quite fastidious with keeping print outs of their monthly Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and VAT reports and with the help of Hegashall’s accountants, Emslie Bird Limited (www.emsliebird.co.uk) a series of journals were entered which completed the re-build. Jon Shakespeare from Freshmetrics (www.freshmetrics.eu) then linked the new Sage 50 Accounts database to the Freshmetrics Stock Control system and within 24 hours, Hegashall were back up and running.
Valuable lessons were learned from this unexpected crash, the main one being the need to setup disaster recovery solutions to prevent such a stressful incident in the future. Jayne sourced a local online cloud backup solution from Synium IT Limited (www.synium.co.uk) who have introduced an automated daily cloud backup service and who now provide a first class IT service to Hegashall. This new relationship also brought about the complete overhaul of their website by design studio Hint (www.wearehint.co.uk) with plans to further develop links to include an online ordering and delivery service in late 2018.
Hegashall were also encouraged to take on Sage 50 Payroll and Sage 50 HR to process their weekly and monthly payroll instead of using the HMRC Basic PAYE tool, Jayne set Sage 50 Payroll up with them and trained their Office Manager to use it over a two day period ensuring that the Nominal link was completed that automatically posts the Payroll journals to the Sage 50 Accounts Nominal Ledger. Two days Sage 50 HR training were taken the following month which has enabled Hegashall to store their employee data electronically with event reminders created to pop up and remind the Office Manager when probationary periods are due to expire, their all-important Fork Lift Truck licences and Health and Safety certificates need to be renewed and holiday/absence recording is kept up to date.
Finally, Hegashall were advised to take out and maintain a monthly subscription to the award winning Sage Cover Extra service from Sage UK Limited to ensure that they have first class technical support from the authors of their accounting software.