Case Study · Field Service

Ledger Row made the export the product.

Five systems held the customer file and none of them agreed. This is what changed in the four weeks after they consolidated, and what it cost them to get there.

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About the Client

Ledger Row, and the spreadsheet at the end of every session.

Ledger Row sells reporting software to accounting teams. Every user ended a session the same way: export to a spreadsheet, then do the real work there. That told us where the product stopped, and the reports had been built to be looked at rather than taken away.

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The Challenge

Five systems, five versions of the same customer.

The reports were finished software. What came after them was not, and that was the half the customer spent their day in.

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Data Silos

The customer file lived in several systems at once and no two of them agreed on the current address.

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Manual Processes

Most of a full-time role went on re-keying the same records and assembling the weekly report.

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Nobody could answer a simple question

Asking how many accounts were overdue meant three exports and an afternoon of reconciling them by hand.

The Solution

The export became the thing we designed.

The export was rebuilt to carry structure rather than a flat grid, so the file arrives with the grouping and the formulas already in place. The on-screen report became a preview of that file rather than a separate artefact. Both shipped behind a flag and were turned on one customer at a time.

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Key Features

What made the difference.

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Integrations

The systems holding customer data now read and write to one record.

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Automation

The handoffs that used to be re-keyed now run without anyone touching them.

insights

One reporting surface

The on-screen report and the downloaded file are generated from the same query, so the two cannot drift apart.

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Editing without a release

Field names, statuses and templates moved into settings, so the operations team changes them without waiting for a deploy.

1

Watch the work

Two weeks sitting with the people who ran the weekly report, watching what they did after the download.

2

Agree one record

One record shape agreed, then the five sources mapped onto it with the disagreements written down rather than resolved silently.

3

Run both in parallel

The new export ran beside the old one for a fortnight so the two files could be compared before anything was switched off.

4

Cut over by account

Turned on one account at a time behind a flag, with the old export left readable until nobody was opening it.

In their words

What the team said after the cutover.

A quote from the people who ran it, about the part of it that mattered to them.

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We stopped keeping the customer file in five places. The argument about which system was right ended the week we cut over, and nobody has asked for the spreadsheets back.
Terry Larson
Terry Larson Head of Operations, Ledger Row
The Results

What changed after cutover.

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One file, not two artefacts

What is on screen and what downloads are the same object. A change to the report is a change to the export.

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The manual re-keying stopped

Completed jobs move into invoicing without an export, so the back office spends its day on exceptions rather than typing.

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The work after the download is shorter

The grouping and the formulas arrive in the file, so the first ten minutes in the spreadsheet are gone.

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The team owns the changes

Field names, statuses and templates are edited by the operations team. No release is needed to change a form.

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Start here

Which systems hold your customer file?

Tell us which systems hold your customer file today and we will tell you what a cutover would involve, in writing, before anyone signs anything.

Two weeks, one fixed fee credited against a project

  • check_circle A written assessment before anything is built
  • check_circle A cutover plan with the old system left readable
  • check_circle Your team edits the fields without a release
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