Candis magazine still growing with Greentree
One of Britain’s top selling women’s magazines, Candis is packed with features, health news, recipes and competitions. As well as twelve issues a year, a Candis subscription also gives subscribers year round offers, discounts and savings on family days out, shopping, cinema tickets and more. It’s the subscriptions that has helped Candis Club donate over £55 million to health charities since 1962!
“Our ancient and extremely inflexible old legacy system was hugely cumbersome and was well past its sell-by date,” says Christine Blackford, Finance Director at Candis Magazine. Getting data in and information out of the system had become a nightmare. Without the support of a robust business management system, navigating growth was like steering a ship without a rudder.
Christine was well advanced in the evaluation process and poised to make a decision when serendipity intervened by way of a phone call from Prerogative Ltd. Although Sage, Access Accounts, IRIS Exchequer and CODA had been looked at, the more she heard about Greentree, the more she liked what she heard. She invited Prerogative to undertake a demonstration and the deal was sealed.
Lower overall total cost of ownership
The other systems Christine evaluated required ongoing administration and maintenance which effectively required additional IT support. By comparison, Greentree does not and Christine easily administers the system herself. In fact, she says it’s “self-maintaining.” Greentree is also an extraordinary fit with the Candis publishing, distribution and sales model.
Christine believes that these factors combine to result in lower it infrastructural costs, reduced external support time and ultimately, an overall lower total cost of ownership.
Tree analysis enables more accurate cost control & reporting
Whilst Greentree is competitively priced as a mid-market business management system, Christine is adamant that although price is always a consideration, it was the quality of its reporting that really caught her eye.
“Excel links in and out of Greentree and transaction tree analysis add a whole new dimension to reporting – the value of this for me is immeasurable. For example, we can now manage and allocate magazine costs to issues and pages more accurately. This has given management a level and standard of reporting they’ve never had before. The similarly positioned systems I looked at simply couldn’t provide this at that price.”
Greentree future-proofs the impact of growth
When Christine was evaluating various systems, she had a vision of how future growth would impact upon various parts of the business. She wanted a system that would enable that vision. For example, she had a very good idea about how she wanted to design the financial management environment and specifically, how she wanted to set-up complex Charts of Accounts, trees etc. She had no desire to undertake these sorts of tasks over and over again.
As the business grew, Greentree has enabled her to manage years of change without the need to undertake high-level re-designs of the financial management environment. This has potentially avoided any additional time and cost further down the track.
“Using Greentree has represented a quantum leap from last century into the future. Today, we’re still adapting and growing into it and I can see us using it for many more years to come.”
Candis is a subscription-only magazine with over 121,918 circulation (ABC Jan-June 2015). Candis Club has given over £55m to health charities from Candis magazine subscription since it was set up in 1962. Members pay £44.90 a year for their subscription and receive their copy of Candis via post, making Candis one of the largest monthly subscription titles. Candis Club uses its buying power to secure big savings on products and services for its members, including insurances, high street shopping and holidays.
Key benefits
