Cotswold Building Supplies save time and money with Trader

Cotswold Building Supplies were spending too much time producing manual quotations and inputting manual invoices into their accounts system – so they installed Trader.

Some companies start using Trader software because they’re frustrated with the limitations of generic software, or they’re looking for a new version of old, unsupported builders’ merchants software. For other companies, Trader represents a first foray into builders’ merchant software. Cotswold Building Supplies fit into the third of those categories. The team used software for their accounts system but used manual systems for all other aspects of the business, including at the point-of-sale.

The manual approach had many limitations. An entire week was spent each month inputting invoice details into the accounts system in order to produce statements. These statements were then sent out by post, which was a significant expense for the business. Manually created invoices made it impractical to track margins. Similarly, manual quotations were time consuming to produce and difficult to track. Cotswold Building Supplies also managed supplier and customer pricing manually. This was a monumental task that ate into employees’ time.

Director David Galbraith installed Trader to provide the company with an integrated system that solved the problems with the former manual approach. The software is now used at both the trade counter and for retail sales, automatically bringing together sales figures from both sources in one database.

The Worcestershire-based business is a recent convert to Trader software, but we hope this will signal the start of a long and fruitful relationship.

If you’d like to make the transition from a manual system to software in your builders’ merchant, contact the Trader team to get started, or find out more about the functions of software for builders’ merchants.