Customer Experiences

Customer Experiences

The Swan, Kidderminster

Landlord Andy Evans has been in the Licensed Trade for over 15 years. His pub – The Swan, in Kidderminster - is a busy town-centre pub catering for a wide variety of customers. The pub provides a selection of traditional ales and quality bar meals and snacks, as well as a typical range of spirits, liqueurs and wines.

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Andy was confident that trade was heading the right way, but felt that he needed more detailed information to really understand what was going on within his business.

“Like a lot of publicans, I could look at the till takings and see whether we had turned over more or less. I was also getting stock takers in every month or two to audit the stock. But I felt I wasn’t really getting a complete picture and the information I did have was more or less historical.”

“Because the stock report was paper based, it tended to get tucked away in a file and was never really used. So I was spending around £1800 a year on not achieving very much!”

Andy realised that he needed a computer-based system to collate all of the information. But he didn’t want to settle for something which would simply replicate the traditional stocktaking process. A lengthy search resulted in him choosing the Cellar Master program. Because it has been designed ‘from the ground up’ for the Licensed Trade, he found it fitted his requirements exactly.

“I’m no computer whiz, but this is really easy to use .It’s very well laid out, and I found that I was soon able to set up new products, change prices and the like. But the best part is the actual stock-take process. It prints out a list which you just take round and fill in the blanks. I can now do hassle-free stock takes whenever I want! It also lets me enter my till readings to balance the takings against stock used.”

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“I can get so much useful information out of this. Because it’s there on the screen, I can see how we are doing, what my total stock value is, how many day’s supply I have in hand and so on. It can even tell me the margin I’m making on a single drink!”

Spurred on by the immediate success of the software, Andy has now decided to upgrade his ageing tills to more modern ones, which can be connected directly to his PC. This will enable him to upload the Z-report data directly into Cellar Master.

“It makes sense to do this… Code have done a great job on the back-end software, now I need them to sort out the tills and make it hang together as a complete system.”

“After that’s done, I’ll get them to activate the link to my Sage accounts package.”

He now has his eye on the kitchen! He plans to bring food ingredients and other costs into the system, using the built-in Bill of Materials function to determine the real cost of producing a meal.

“We use it for costing cocktails, so why not use it for steak eggs and chips?” he says as he heads off to serve another customer.