The Climbing Hangar Scales New Heights with Sage Intacct and Percipient
Digital transformation of the OCFO allows indoor climbing wall leader, The Climbing Hangar, to automate intelligence and expedite growth strategy.
About The Climbing Hangar
The Climbing Hangar started in a Liverpool warehouse in 2011. Since then, it has become a national business with nine sites, employing more than 200 people and attracting tens of thousands of customers every month.
Its mission is simple – to help its customers lead happier, healthier, and more connected lives through climbing.
Scaling for Growth
The Climbing Hangar opened its first site in Scotland earlier this year, following the successful launch of Reading in 2023, taking its total number of centres to nine. In line with this rapid growth, the leisure leader had outgrown its previous Sage 50 system, which was manually intensive and error prone. This left the team exposed to risk and spending unnecessary amounts of time processing month-end.
Having reviewed the market for a modern, cloud-based financials platform to replace Sage 50, the team selected Sage Intacct along with consultancy, Percipient. The decision was based on Sage Intacct’s integrated financials, particularly the PO functionality and drill-down capability to access detail and allow site teams to view insights quickly. Having looked at Sage 200, SAP and NetSuite as part of its procurement process, Sage Intacct was considered the best fit, with the most flexibility to support current and future needs.
Sage Intacct forms a fundamental part of our digital strategy, delivering the speed, intelligence, and flexibility from which to run our business. Through its dashboards and reporting, it delivers a consolidated view of performance across all our centres.
High Expectations
The Climbing Hangar went live with Sage Intacct in October 2022 following a short deployment. In addition to streamlined financials, It now benefits from greater control over and access to intelligence.
This, in turn, is allowing the leisure specialist to scale and stay one step ahead of its growth curve. Teams can distil the right data to run the business, create management accounts concisely, and view P&L in varying levels of detail on dashboards that business users across the organisation can view as appropriate. This capability affords greater visibility and allows the team to react quickly to trends and anomalies to capitalise on opportunities and mitigate risk.
“Sage Intacct forms a fundamental part of our digital strategy, delivering the speed, intelligence, and flexibility from which to run our business. Through its dashboards and reporting, it delivers a consolidated view of performance across all our centres,” comments Laura Johnson, Head of Finance at The Climbing Hangar.
“Crucially, Sage Intacct has instilled us with the necessary scale to grow our estate to another two sites, including Reading and Edinburgh, without any additional financial resources. We now have a live view of cost commitments and associated invoicing, which ensures month-end accuracy and cashflow forecasting, which is crucial in a business like ours.”
The Climbing Hangar’s AP processing has been reduced by at least two days because of greater process automation, bringing significant efficiency gains. Purchase orders are automatically scheduled, ensuring a much more organised system and allowing the team to understand options and opportunities when it comes to refining suppliers across the retail, café and equipment aspects of the business. Sage Intacct’s bank posting rules attach and link payments directly, removing any potential bottlenecks, as Laura adds:
“The automation and efficiency gains derived from Sage Intacct means that we have reduced the time taken to complete month-end by at least a week, whilst also providing better information to our stakeholders. It truly makes life so much easier.
“The impact of any last minute changes is significantly less, as they can be tracked and adjusted in real-time to instil rigour and flexibility.”
The Climbing Hangar operates a self-service model whereby any business user or budget holder can use the system. This allows them to access their own P&L and drill down to understand income and expense levels. This, in turn, reduces query resolution time to optimise productivity and agility in making decisions.
Ultimately, Sage Intacct adds immense value to our entire business. As well as the automation which drives efficiency from which to free up people for value-add tasks, the system allows us to focus more on the why rather than the do, with the reporting providing us with insights from which to empower and improve operations.
Adding Value Through Automation
“Ultimately, Sage Intacct adds immense value to our business. As well as the automation which drives efficiency from which to free up people for value-add tasks, the system allows us to focus more on the why rather than the do, with the reporting providing insights from which to empower and improve operations.
Laura concludes, “There is a huge comfort factor and confidence in knowing we have a scalable system to support our ambitious plans, and Percipient has supported us throughout our digital transformation journey so far.”
Sage Intacct Partner for Leisure
If you would like to learn more about Sage Intacct, our work with The Climbing Hangar, or how we can help your leisure business, please get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.
