When Eve Davies lost her cat Lola in a road traffic accident, she and her partner were looking for a way to keep their other cat safe from the dangers of free-roaming. In 2012, Eve Davies and her partner founded ProtectaPet, a business dedicated to allowing cats to experience the outdoors while giving their owners a peace of mind.
ProtectaPet started by developing a cat fence garden barrier and have since grown from strength to strength, developing cat enclosures and cat enclosure patios. Although they sell predominantly to the UK market, they also export their products across Europe.
Despite their great business growth, ProtectaPet also had mounting inventory management struggles.
Frequent inaccuracies with spreadsheets
Up until 18 months ago, the team at ProtectaPet were managing their inventory on Excel spreadsheets, meaning that their inventory had to be manually updated. “It became increasingly difficult to know what quantity and value of stock we had,” says Eve. With the challenge of managing multiple spreadsheets, they never had a live count of their inventory stock, leading to frequent inaccuracies for the team.
Supporting growth with cloud-based inventory management
“Fundamentally, every business needs to know what value it has in inventory stock,” asserts Eve. The team at ProtectaPet needed a live and accurate update of their inventory in order to establish this.
ProtectaPet are no strangers to benefits of cloud-based software - since their inception, they have been using Xero to manage their accounting. This prompted them to search for an inventory management software that could seamlessly integrate with Xero to avoid data being duplicated across systems.
With Unleashed, they have been able to purchase with great understanding of purchasing history. “This really enables us to negotiate hard and fast on prices,” explains Eve.
“Unleashed is really important to our business because we run purchase orders, sales orders, and our inventory management through it. It’s become integral to the smooth running of our business.”
Most importantly, ProtectaPet have been able to prevent overstocking, which is fundamental to the cash flow of their business.
Taking inventory management to the cloud has greatly benefitted Eve and her team. Now they spend less time worrying about the minutiae of their inventory stock, and more time focusing on high level business planning and spending time with family!
