Case Study: Bridgestone

Brief

Bridgestone New Zealandwas formed in September 1998 following the merger of two of New Zealand's largest tyre companies: Bridgestone and Firestone. Bridgestone New Zealand Ltd is the leading Tyre Manufacturer and Retailer in New Zealand, selling tyres under both the 'Bridgestone' and 'Firestone' brands. Tyres are sold and serviced through Firestone outlets and Bridgestone Dealers. There are currently over 200 retail outlets in New Zealand who sell and service Bridgestone and Firestone tyres.

Bridgestone have been using Cashbooks V3.0 since 1999 which included the use of Cashbooks Bank deposit slip by over 60 retail stores nationwide. Prior to the implementation of Cashbook each store was depositing money daily to banks with no standardised process for recording remittance information. All local branches swept to 4 central bank accounts each night and we reconciled centrally. The main issue for Bridgestone was the lack of remittance information being recorded at time of deposit and inability to reconcile items on the Bank Statements. Within the Finance Department of Bridgestone a large amount of time was being spent on manually entering remittance information for the larger customers (remittances greater than 18 pages) and also the lack of flexibility within the ERP to deal with short payments, write off’s and deductions.

Business Process before our solution was implemented:

• Bridgestone’s 60 stores entering cash manually into BCPS
• Approximately 2500 checks are received each month
• 4 different bank accounts reconciled centrally for all 60 stores.
• Large paper remittances (Greater than 18 pages) entered manually to offset AR.

Solution

Bridgestone implemented Cashbook’s Bank Deposit Slip for all of its retail outlets in New Zealand. Each outlet records the daily deposits to the branch in Cashbook automatically creating a bank deposit slip and journal with their ERP which is then offset automatically to Open AR invoices once it appears on the Bank Statement.

For EFPOS transactions all Sales invoices are loaded electronically into the ERP system and Cashbook then creates a payment journal which is used both to automatically match the EFTPOS invoices generated and is uploaded into Cashbook’s Bank reconciliation enabling over 95% match of transactions through Cashbooks auto reconciliation feature.

The key features of the solution are:

• Retail focused solution for managing branch bank deposits and bank reconciliation.
• Once point of entry for all cash and cheque deposits
• All receipt information is recorded at source (retail outlet).
• Automated Bank statement upload
• Centralized Bank reconciliation and management of cash
• Effective Cash Forecasting

Results

Key benefits of this project included:

• Automated match rates average between 70% and 99.5%.
• Significant savings have been achieved on bank charges.
• Massive time and monetary savings in Bank reconciliation process.
• Standardized process for recording of Bank Deposits in all retail outlets.

Customer Comment: