Profitability, rentals, sales, purchasing - Vigilant does the whole thing for Hurricane Alley and Cruz Bay Watersports

by Andy Shaw

In the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hurricane Alley and Cruz Bay Water Sports have discovered that hurricanes and Vigilant have one thing in common. They both pack quite a punch. Chuck Feldman, president of Bestech Inc., a value-added reseller and installer of Vigilant on the island of St. John, recalls Hurricane Marilyn walloping the entire area a few years back. A storm so severe, in fact, that a retail dive and rental shop then known as St. John Water Sports renamed their company to the more appropriate Hurricane Alley.

"I think Vigilant packs the most punch of any accounting software package on the market," he asserts. However, hurricanes and Vigilant have very different effects on businesses they impact. The former create chaos out of order, while the latter does quite the opposite.

Lisa Brown-Eberhardt handled the books at Hurricane Alley before setting out on a round-the-world cruise remembers their search for a software package best suited to them. "My parents first established our business when they came cruising down here about 30 years ago from New England and stayed," she recalls. "We began by looking after people's boats which we still do but then we started selling and renting snorkel and other diving gear. We were growing and knew we couldn't handle sales manually any more. We needed a system."

For more than seven years now, Vigilant's Point of Sale, inventory control and accounting package has been systematically tallying sales and rentals of Hurricane Alley's snorkels, masks, flippers, beach chairs, and coolers to Virgin Island vacationers.

"We also do all of our ordering from the reports the Vigilant system produces for us," Lisa explains. "And it does a lot more including keeping track of our receivables and payables, purchase orders, the commissions we give on rentals, special pricing we have on postcards, and our year-ends. Really, it does the whole thing."

It could certainly be a difficult task to process payroll when you have as many fluctuations in staff as Lisa and Hurricane Alley do. "From Thanksgiving to Easter is really our high season. So then we might have as many as 30 people on the payroll and then drop down to five or six in the off-season," explains Lisa. "It is easy to take people on and off the system and also to move them around between various jobs because Vigilant is very easy to access and to learn."

That flexibility will also aid Lisa's parents in expanding their business on St. John. Although Hurricane Marilyn wiped out their second outlet franchised in Puerto Rico, they are currently setting up a marine hardware store. Following its launch, the Browns can track all aspects of the additional location, including profitability, through Vigilant's Multi-Site Polling module.

Cruz Bay Water Sports, another of Bestech's clients, employs Multi-Site Polling daily, reconciling the business results of their three locations. Among these, is a beach sales and rentals store, also located on St. John. When Chuck Feldman arrived on the scene, they were operating their businesses manually, a day-to-day nightmare of crunching numbers.

"Cruz Bay was operating with just an electronic cash register and manually extrapolating the numbers onto spreadsheets," Feldman illustrates. "But we were able to convince them to change to a networked PC system partly because of the low cost of the Vigilant software. Now they have sales terminals, receipt printers, bar-code scanners and other peripherals networked to a back-office server in their main store."

The owners of Cruz Bay can now more efficiently run their business with this automation. "They can pull up reports instantly from Vigilant that give them very good information about their sales, their inventory - anything involved with the throughput of their business."

A true believer in what he sells, Feldman has installed Vigilant at Bestech as well. "I actually once tried a competitive product that looked good on the face of it. But when we started using it there were so many holes in the program, we fired Vigilant right back in there so fast," Feldman recalls. He adds that Vigilant is so robust that calls for help are very rare. With hurricanes, Chuck and Lisa should only be so lucky.