Cash Converters was founded in Australia around ten years ago. The retailer handles £100 million a year in third-party cheques through its cheque cashing service, and is the largest Western Union agent in the UK. In addition, its UK network of more than 100 franchised and corporately owned stores sells some new stock, which is procured through deals brokered by Cash Converters' UK head office. Suppliers deliver directly to stores, but send their invoices to Cash Converters' central admin team. They then add a small margin, before re-invoicing each store for the goods received.

The company’s existing finance system was creaking under the volumes of transactions being put through it. However, dedicated stock-control systems were simply too expensive. "We didn't have hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend," points out Jim Spratley, Cash Converters' director of finance. Cash Converters looked at upgrading to a more sophisticated product and turned to CODA and its Dream product. "I knew Dream could handle our accounts, and discussions with CODA made it clear that a small software enhancement would provide the extra stock functions we needed in a unified system," he explains.

The Dream solution has eliminated much of the manual processing that was needed with Cash Converters' old system in order to raise purchase orders for stock and generate invoices for each store. On top of that, Dream can import data from Cash Converters' network of franchised stores, which is provided daily in the form of Excel spreadsheets, and is able to hold figures for both value and count of stock. The system supports five members of staff, with management reporting for two users through DreamView.

"Dream has really taken the pressure off our stock procurement department," Spratley says. "We're already saving time, and will be able to save even more in future when we add another enhancement to Dream that will allow us to automatically take regular payments for stock from franchisees by direct debit, using BACS."

Dream will also underpin the development of Cash Converters' growing network of corporately owned stores. "We currently have 104 franchised stores and just two we operate directly, but we see our future in expanding the number of corporate outlets," says Spratley. "Dream will enable us to expand without adding significantly to the finance team at head office.

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