Case Study – Liquid & Gordon Montgomery

About Gordon Montgomery…

Gordon Montgomery set up and runs The OnBoard Partnership (‘TOP’), a strategic and financial advisory business based in Hungerford, Berkshire. A chartered accountant by training, before spending the last 25 years in corporate finance, venture capital and as a COO/CFO of a public company, Gordon targets TOP’s services at two types of business.

Firstly, TOP helps to construct viable business plans and focuses on raising finance for new businesses, especially technology companies, who are in the early stages of set-up. As one aspect of this service, TOP will act as the part-time finance director for such businesses and set up the accounting and reporting systems with which to manage the operation. These companies typically have low-volume and simple day-to-day bookkeeping requirements that can be handled by a general secretary or administrator but need experienced and reliable cash management and forecasting without being the size to justify the cost of a full-time accountant. One such company that TOP manages through Liquid’s Client Manager software is Corvia Limited. Corvia, which Gordon helped to establish in September 2009, provides electronic ticket and location management systems to bus service operators.

Secondly, TOP takes on turnaround assignments in companies experiencing profit and / or cash flow difficulties. TOP acts on behalf of the controlling investors to identify and implement a profitable recovery / growth strategy and typically reorganizes the financial and reporting systems to ensure greater control of the finances and performance of the business. It was in this context that Gordon became involved with another of TOP’s clients, The Country Food and Dining Group (‘CFD’), which runs a growing group of farm shops.

TOP chose to implement Liquid as an effective, comparatively low-cost, distributed accounting system across all CFD’s farm shop sites alongside CFD’s till-based EPOS system. Each site has its own accounts ledger operated by an on-site, part-time administrative person who does all the transaction entry, debtor, creditor and bank reconciliations. TOP then does the monthly accruals, prepayments and adjustments before downloading the month-end trial balances for each site into the integrated, spreadsheet based, management accounts reporting package that TOP devised for CFD, which includes updating profit and cash flow forecasts.

Liquid & Gordon Montgomery…

Gordon has been using Liquid since April 2009 and uses Liquid’s free Client Manager package to manage the accounts for two of TOP’s clients.

‘The key reason behind my switch to Liquid’s online accounting package was that, as it is all done online, I am able to manage the accounts of my clients from any location. I can access up-to-date figures from their offices, from my office, from the comfort of my own home, or when I am on the move. Also, my clients can log in at the same time and I can give them remote financial advice, despite being hundreds of miles apart. Auditors can also be given remote access, which helps to streamline their work and keep the audit cost down.

Another reason for choosing Liquid was the ease-of-use for both myself and my clients. For untrained end-users, the user interface provides an easy-to-use, jargon-free accounting package that has the feel of a regular offline desktop package.

When deciding upon an accounting software package I looked at a range of similar products, but Liquid came out on top as it has the potential to be a very powerful package and cloud accounting will certainly be the main method of managing accounts in the future for small to medium-sized companies.

Although Liquid is easy to use, the substantial library of help documentation and help videos available through the application are a great resource. If myself or a client gets stuck when managing the accounts, they can simply access these step-by-step guides for a quick and easy solution. Alternatively, I can just give the Liquid team a call and they will help me out with minimal fuss.’

Gordon Montgomery, The OnBoard Partnership