A family-owned freight company running lines out of three regional depots had outgrown its bookkeeping. The ledger lived in one spreadsheet per depot, consolidated by the office manager into a master workbook whose size had begun corrupting on save. Month end took nine working days. The directors approved large purchases by intuition, because the figures arrived too late to inform anything.
The difficulty
Three depots meant three charts of accounts that had drifted apart over a decade, so like-for-like cost comparison was impossible. Driver fuel-and-maintenance claims arrived as paper dockets, keyed twice, disputed often. The office manager — the only person who understood the master workbook — was planning to retire within the year, taking the reporting capability with her.
Project snapshot
- SectorFreight & Logistics
- Modules deployedInsight Ledger, Insight Reports
- Duration13 weeks, including a two-month parallel run
- Written up withClient permission; identifying detail removed
Numbers quoted in this study were measured by the client before and after the change — they are not our estimates. Where a figure could not be measured cleanly, it has been left out rather than rounded flatteringly.
What we changed
Process review ran as three half-day workshops, one per depot, so every site saw its own working mapped. We unified the chart of accounts around one structure with depot cost centres, migrated two years of history per depot, and ran a two-month parallel consolidation in which the old workbook and Insight Ledger were reconciled line by line. Fuel claims moved to a standard intake form with photo attachment in Insight Docs, feeding the ledger without rekeying. The Insight Reports pack replaced the master workbook with six dashboards the directors helped design.
The results
- Month end reduced from nine working days to two.
- Depot-for-depot cost comparison available for the first time in the company’s history.
- Retirement of the master workbook completed without loss of knowledge.
- Fuel claim disputes down to near zero — the docket photo travels with the claim.
Both systems were reconciled for two months, so the office manager retired with the company already trusting the new figures.
If your organisation looks like this one
If month end is the worst week of your month, count the hours: who works late, how often, and what the reconciliation consumes. That figure is the business case. Run a parallel run before decommissioning anything, and put the person who understands the old system in charge of signing off the new one.
To see how a project like this would run against your own calendar and numbers, ask us for a written quote — A ledger-and-reporting rescue is usually a one-page quote.