SXOLLIE a UK-based Cider brand

Who are SXOLLIE? 

SXOLLIE are a UK-based Cider brand, which specialise in natural, clean, and crisp tasting cider. Their unique recipe of a single ingredient – apples that can be found in your fruit bowl – without additives, sugar or concentrates that are commonly found in cider, is what makes their products so special. 

After a tough time, balancing year-end stock-on-hand in their accounting software vs their tracked stock in spreadsheets, SXOLLIE’s accountant partner recommended Unleashed as an inventory management solution.  

The Challenge 

As well as the challenge of consolidating and comparing records for year-end accounting, SXOLLIE were also experiencing challenges with: 

After exploring other inventory management systems, SXOLLIE Founder, Laura Clacey decided that Unleashed was the right fit for their needs, she said: “Unleashed was definitely found to be the most cost effective but also had the most functionality within the system.” 

How has Unleashed helped? 

Onboarding Unleashed was a comprehensive process for Laura and her team, spanning 8 weeks. With support from their dedicated onboarding team member, they were able to put in place the structure and systems needed to run the business efficiently. 

Laura said: “The onboarding process for Unleashed was phenomenal. The level of detail we went into and the structures we put in place, that we didn't have beforehand were incredible. We've now got the structures in place that as a small business, help us to grow much more quickly.” 

Leadership 

As the Founder of the business, Laura spends a large part of her workday using the dashboards and reports within Unleashed to monitor SXOLLIE’s performance. With a configurable dashboard, Laura has been able to set up insights so she can instantly see:  

Alongside this, reports such as the margin report and sales report are her best friends. These help her to monitor the health of the business and are the basis of her monthly reporting.  

“To give you a sense of how important it is in my business, Unleashed is probably the number one thing I use to manage our business. I log into it about fifteen times a day.”  

Unleashed has also helped Laura address the stock-on-hand and year-end reporting challenge that originally led them to the software. Laura said: “There's an audit trail of what's been produced, what's gone out and what's left at the end of the year. And now when we're trying to balance Xero and the balance sheet, it has become far quicker and easier to close out the stock values at the end of the year.” 

Sales Teams 

Unleashed has enabled the SXOLLIE sales team to no longer have to rely on back-and-forth communication to deal with incoming enquiries. Now, with sales orders logged in Unleashed and progress of orders clearly indicated, they can easily see when an order is placed, has been processed and delivered; there is no need for constant ad-hoc messages and emails between team members. 

Additionally, invoices are no longer being missed, and if there are queries on delivery, delivery notes are stored to eliminate friction. 

Production Teams 

With production reports built into Unleashed, SXOLLIE’s production team can keep on top of cost of goods sold (COGS) and monitor how their SKUs are being affected by supply chain price rises.  

Whereas before, it would have taken months to work out whether a SKU was cost-effective, they can now see instantly where the cost of components, are affecting a product lines’ profitability, and corrective action can be taken immediately.  

Laura said: “As an example, there was one of our SKUs that we were really proud of, and thought was doing really well. It would've taken us months beforehand to work this out, but within a month I worked out that actually we were losing money on that SKU.” 

How has Fathom added to SXOLLIE’s tech stack? 

Laura was originally looking for a forecasting tool when she discovered Fathom and quickly discovered that Fathom was offering what she needed. With a broad range of internal and external stakeholders needing reliable data and insights, Fathom makes the task simple.  

Previously, Laura was spending hours gathering data, chopping spreadsheets, financial reports and collating it all into multiple presentations or reports for investors, the board, the management team and the SXOLLIE workforce.  

Whereas with Fathom, she can use templates for each stakeholder type, import data from her software stack, and generate reports which contain the relevant charts, graphs, insights.  

“Every month the same input data goes into Fathom, and the report is cut specifically for each segment or group that needs the report. It's probably cut my reporting time by two days a month and everyone likes it because it's consistent, stable, and reliable.” 

Additionally, Fathom allows Laura to create data-rich insights into performance, which may not be clear from a single data set. Fathom allows SXOLLIE to pair data from their accounting software and Unleashed, and compare them to KPIs set for the business and individual team members, such as ‘impact per sales team member.’ 

“Fathom is a really powerful tool that allows you to get in depth information and insights from the hundreds of streams of information that exist within a business. It's the best tool to pull it all together and spit out something that's useful for a variety of stakeholders.”