"Now that I'm good at Monarch, everyone comes to me for all their report needs. I'm the resident Monarch 'power user.' But then that's job security!"

 

Del Africa is Assistant Controller for Lumber City Corporation, d/b/a California Do-It Center, a chain of home improvement stores in Southern California. Del shares with us a truly remarkable success story, in which Monarch provides amazing benefits across all aspects of retail management:

"The report writing capabilities of our business software is very limited and hard to use, which is typical of report writers. This is where Monarch comes in. I use FTP to download data from our business operating system and use Monarch to manipulate the data and export it to Lotus, Excel, DBF, or text format."

"I use Monarch to generate Accounting, Marketing, Payroll and other data, from single-page summaries to 100-page detailed reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Monarch models really simplify creation of these reports and Monarch's drill-down capabilities allow summary presentations quickly."

"We have 10 home improvement stores, each having an item master list containing anywhere from 25,000 to 40,000 SKU's, 25% of which are unique to each store, broken down into different classes, sections and sub-sections. Creating a report, for example, after fiscal year-end inventory, to review quantities and cost/retail relationship per SKU for the combined chain is a challenge. Monarch easily handles and combines the data, allows filtering of items falling within specified parameters, and presents both detailed reports for audit and summary drilled-down reports for top management use. Other reports that I constantly generate using our item master list are last buys, zip code statistics, and sales/inventory comparisons for current and previous years. I just use the same files but use different models to create these reports. Nice thing about these models is they're also applicable to reports for Patioworld, an affiliate of Lumber City, selling patio furniture. "

"Another area where I use Monarch is our ABL report to the bank. The bank requires a reporting package submitted every month for A/R, A/P and Inventory. General Accounting used to print all the reports (A/R Aging, A/P Aging, Inventory listing) and send these hard copies to the bank. Now I just download these reports to my PC then use Monarch to capture the data the bank specifically needs, which I forward to the bank. The bank can directly analyze and manipulate the data I submitted; they don't need to re-key the data from the printed reports. "

"After I introduced Monarch at the previous companies that I worked for, and the current company that I work at, the responses from my bosses and co-workers are similar: Monarch is amazing, a powerful business tool, and so simple to use."

Del concludes, "Now that I'm good at Monarch, everyone comes to me for all their report needs. I'm the resident Monarch 'power user.' But then that's job security!"

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