Sales invoices
Sales invoices are brought into the ledgers by import rather than keyed one at a time.
Customer story
From seven companies to a £140m group, on the same finance system.
Star Cargo Group is a holding company with seven transport and logistics subsidiaries, from freight forwarding and customs clearance to fuel cards and its own haulage fleet. Its head-office finance team has run the group’s accounts on DataFlow since the mid-1990s.
“DataFlow does exactly what we need it to. It has never been an issue of us becoming too big for it, and if we have an issue there’s always someone you can get on the end of the phone.”
Industry
Transport & logistics
With DataFlow since
1996
Primary use
Multi-company accounting & VAT
Companies on DataFlow
7 of the group’s 8
About Star Cargo Group
A transport group with seven specialist subsidiaries.
Star Cargo plc was formed in 1983 as the parent company of a group of businesses in international transport and shipping. Headquartered in St Albans, Hertfordshire, it is a privately owned family business whose seven subsidiaries operate autonomously while drawing on shared group resources.
Between them, the companies cover freight forwarding from offices in the Midlands, Kent and Yorkshire, customs clearance and ferry agency work, UK and European fuel cards, warehousing, a commercial vehicle workshop and an own-account haulage fleet running to and from north-west Europe. The group employs around 280 people and works with customers across the globe.
Why DataFlow
Modern accounts for a growing group.
Star Cargo moved onto DataFlow in the mid-1990s. The aim, as the finance team understands it today, was simply to give the group a much more modern accounting system than the one it had been running. The forwarding companies and the holding company ran on it from head office.
Other businesses followed as the group changed. A dozen years ago around five of the group’s companies were on DataFlow. Around that time Sealane Freight, which operates the group’s own fleet of 38 trucks and 75 trailers, was brought across from the separate system it had been running, so that its accounts sat alongside the rest of the group. Husk UK, the fuel-card business that has since become the largest and most profitable company in the group, runs its own accounts department with its own DataFlow system.
Today every company in the group except one runs its accounts on DataFlow. Only Harbour Shipping, the customs clearance and ferry agency business, works on a separate integrated operations and accounts system. Everything else, at head office and at Husk, feeds into group finance through DataFlow.
The finance operation
Invoices, bank, VAT and year-end for every company.
Group finance is run from head office by a team of nine. Each trading company keeps hold of the work that needs local knowledge: credit control, and the checking and approval of direct purchase and cost-of-sale invoices. Approved invoices are then sent up to head office for processing. Husk UK, with the transaction volumes a fuel-card business generates, is the exception, with its own accounts team.
The work the finance team relies on DataFlow for is the core of group accounting:
Purchase invoices
Cost-of-sale and direct purchase invoices, approved at each company, are imported at head office.
Expense invoices
Expense invoices are processed by the head-office team.
Bank reconciliations
Bank reconciliations for the group companies are completed in DataFlow.
VAT compliance
VAT is handled in the system and has kept step with Making Tax Digital and later VAT changes.
Year-end
The trial balance is exported to Excel to feed the preparation of the year-end accounts.
The same discipline carries through to audit. Once a year, DataFlow takes a remote download of the data for the auditors. Beyond that, whatever the auditors ask for can be exported from the system and sent across.
“We’re able to fairly easily export data out of DataFlow and send it to the auditors. From that perspective it works well.”
Thirty years of change
A bigger group, the same core system.
The Star Cargo of the mid-1990s was a smaller business. Since then the group has added companies, grown its fuel-card business into its largest operation, and seen its customs clearance work expand rapidly after Brexit. Group turnover now sits in the region of £140 million a year, moving with fuel prices.
None of that has required a rethink of the core finance system. DataFlow has accommodated the growth, and legislation has been handled as it arrived: Making Tax Digital and other VAT changes were dealt with in the software, not worked around it.
Part of the reason is that Star Cargo is, by its own description, a straightforward and traditional business. Much of its administration is still paper-based, it has strong systems and controls in place, and it has never needed its accounting to be more complicated than the business itself.
“Over the years DataFlow has had to adapt itself, with Making Tax Digital and other VAT legislation changes, which it reacts to and deals with.”
Why DataFlow remains the right fit
Rarely a reason to call.
DataFlow has stayed the group’s finance system for reasons that are practical rather than sentimental. It has kept pace with the business, it has never required the team to make its accounting more complicated than the business itself, and it has never pushed the group towards a larger platform such as SAP or Oracle to get what it needs.
01
Stable in daily use
The product runs without incident year after year, on a paper-based, controls-led finance process.
02
Right-sized for the group
It covers what a multi-company finance operation of this size needs, without the overhead of an enterprise platform.
03
A person on the end of the phone
Issues go to people the team has dealt with for years, and they are looked at quickly.
“Generally they will look at things pretty quickly, compared to other software companies we have to deal with, where you might have to go through a ticketing system and it can take days to get a response, let alone a solution. DataFlow is always accessible.”
What comes next
A planned move to Clarity.
The group’s next step with DataFlow is a planned move to Clarity, the current generation of the software. The finance team is clear about what it wants from the move and what it does not. The main driver is cybersecurity and a more cloud-based platform, a subject already worked through in detail with DataFlow. Beyond that, the intention is to keep doing what the team does today, without adding complexity.
“The main driver when we move to Clarity will be cybersecurity and moving to more of a cloud-based system. Otherwise it’s very much continuing to do what we do, and keeping it straightforward.”
The verdict
Stable, and firmly recommended.
The finance team has dealt with the same people at DataFlow for more than a decade, and its recommendation comes with a clear sense of the kind of business the product suits.
“If you’re not having to call DataFlow with issues, it’s a good sign the product is working, and very rarely do we need to call on their help. It’s a stable product which provides us with what we need. We would definitely recommend it to a business of a similar size, or with similar requirements to ours.”
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