The Climbing Hangar
The Climbing Hangar Scales New Heights with Sage Intacct and Percipient
Digital transformation enables the indoor climbing wall leader to automate intelligence and expedite its growth strategy.
The Climbing Hangar is one of the UK’s fastest-growing indoor climbing operators, with a network of climbing centres serving communities across the country. As the business continued to grow, it needed a modern finance platform capable of streamlining reporting, improving data accuracy and providing real-time insight across multiple locations.
Percipient implemented Sage Intacct to automate key financial processes, centralise reporting and deliver a single source of truth, enabling the team to make faster, more informed decisions and confidently support future growth.
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 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. With this rapid growth, the leisure leader had outgrown its previous Sage 50 system, which was manual-intensive and error-prone. This left the team exposed to risk and forced them to spend unnecessary time on month-end processing.
After reviewing 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 capabilities that provide detail and enable site teams to view insights quickly. After reviewing Sage 200, SAP, and NetSuite as part of its procurement process, Sage Intacct was 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 provides greater visibility, enabling the team to react quickly to trends and anomalies, 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 through greater process automation, delivering significant efficiency gains. Purchase orders are automatically scheduled, creating a more organised system and helping the team identify opportunities to refine 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 mean 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, allowing any business user or budget holder to use the system. This will enable them to access their own P&L and drill down to understand income and expense levels. This, in turn, reduces query resolution time, optimising productivity and decision-making agility.
Ultimately, Sage Intacct adds immense value to our business. Beyond the automation that drives efficiency and frees people for value-add tasks, the system lets us focus more on the why than the do, with reporting that provides insights to empower and improve operations.
Adding Value Through Automation
“Ultimately, Sage Intacct adds immense value to our business. Beyond the automation that drives efficiency and frees people for value-add tasks, the system lets us focus more on the why than the do, with reporting that provides insights 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 Sports & 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.