Birchwood Energy Bespoke Admin System

The Company

The team at Birchwood Energy provide a professional, wholly independent service, committed to ensuring that their customers receive the most suitable energy supply – at the best cost – tailored to their individual needs. 

Working closely with their portfolio of customers, Birchwood provide assistance - and management - of contract inceptions, renewals and amends. This allows the businesses to remain in full control of their supply agreements, whilst gaining the most competitive renewal prices in a timely manner without hassle. Birchwood Energy’s service continually saves their customer-base unnecessary administration work; saving them time and money.

The Problem

The issue that Birchwood Energy were facing, as is the case with many small to medium-size businesses, was the lack of clarity and ever-growing complexity, created by their working procedures. Whilst this was fine at a low-level - beginning as a humble start-up - using many different systems, spreadsheets and various input channels, meant that their process was becoming more inefficient, more prone to errors and time consuming, as the business continued to scale and flourish.

Working from offline documents is also somewhat precarious for a business of any scale, in terms of reliance on any particular system, workstation or computer. If, for whatever reason, that computer fails terminally – or all of the data is wiped – days, weeks or even months’ worth of invaluable information could be lost; depending on the frequency of off-site IT data backup arrangements, if these are even in place.

The Result

We understand that - for any small business - cash flow and financial management, is an area that often needs to be stringently controlled; with large sums of expenditure for development not always being viable.

Starting with a development roadmap, outlining plans and projected spend over a period of months, allowed Birchwood Energy to build a bespoke admin system without needing to outlay large sums – or unforecasted spend - in any given month.

As the system has developed, the business’ needs for using offline tools, has continued to reduce and is now at such a point, whereby everything required is accounted for within their cloud-based admin system. The system has been tailored perfectly around their working needs – as well as the needs of their customer base – as opposed to having to adjust and change internal processes, as would be required with ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions. With the new system providing a level of automation with calculations, the risk of errors has been greatly reduced.