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Agent Provocateur changes to Exchequer
Agent Provocateur provides exclusive erotic lingerie and adult products through mail order and, primarily, its growing number of shops around London. Three years ago it only had one store, but now has seven of which three opened in the past year. More are planned.
Strict Discipline
Such a fast expansion can place pressures on a small business, and good financial information is essential so problems can be quickly identified and tackled. Strict discipline is certainly associated with many of the adult outfits it sells, and it is also being applied to its accounting and management information to ensure it is the customers that get steamed up, not the management.
Profitability of Individual Shops
Richard Aldington joined in 2002 as Finance Director to provide the financial management expertise to help with Agent Provocateur's expansion. Richard said: "Agent Provocateur was initially using a small company accounts package, which was fine for when it had been one or two sites."
"Now we have a turnover of £4.5million, with £750k profit before tax, and 80 employees, it was completely inadequate for helping me and my team of two, monitor different cost centres – my particular requirement was for a package that would allow me to look at the profitability of individual shops."
Functionality that should have cost more
"Initially I looked at a Sage package and was quite far down the line of choosing it when my accountants suggested I should speak with Whitegate who recommended Exchequer. I was very impressed with the product. It had been a few years since I had last reviewed the software available, but even considering this it still seemed to offer functionality that should, to my mind, have cost much more."
"One area that particularly impressed me was the OLE [Object Linking and Embedding] connectivity with Excel, allowing me to create a dynamic link between the cells in Excel with the data in Exchequer.This means that I save a lot of time not having to re-key actual and budgeted figures into Excel when producing management reports for each store."
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