Jitterbit Enables Financial Visibility at an Industry-Leading Travel Company

With the power of low-code application development, Lucketts Travel built a solution in 3 weeks and eliminated days of manual work.

Challenge

Disparate data sets, along with delayed sales and variable costs tracking, was causing monthly targets to be missed

Operating out of the UK, with depots in Fareham, Worthing, Ringwood and Southampton, Lucketts Travel is the area’s leading coach hire and excursion operator. After nearly 90 years of operation, the company was acquired by National Express in 2020, and it now employs over 400 employees and manages a fleet of more than 150 vehicles. Lucketts Travel is part of Lucketts Holdings, who also own South Coast operators Worthing Coaches, Coliseum Coaches, Solent Coaches and Mortons Travel Limited.

Lucketts Travel Managing Director Tony Lawman wanted a weekly P&L so he could track sales and variable costs closer to real time, and identify budget variances, costs and net margin. This would allow actions to be taken mid-period to address issues and ensure monthly targets were met.

Before Jitterbit, these reports were only available at month’s end — and only after downloading multiple reports from several different systems, then converting and consolidating those disparate data sets.

For example, only when payroll was calculated were employee direct costs known. Complicating the problem was that some results were being tracked in spreadsheets that were not easily shared or updated. This equated to days of intensive labor from the finance department every month.

Solution

Jitterbit’s Vinyl was selected for its low-code development and integration capabilities

Jitterbit’s low-code application development solution, Vinyl, empowered the team to build their own Finance and Accounting application. Instead of managing vital financial information like monthly budgets in spreadsheets, budgets are now managed in a secure relational database within Vinyl, which automatically allocates these budgets by day for each division and category. These budget assignments can then be easily modified to accommodate seasonal adjustments, such as holidays or peak periods.

Using Vinyl’s integration capabilities, the new application was able to integrate key operations and financial data from six different systems — including coach booking schedules, driver tachograph entries, fuel consumption invoices, vehicle maintenance logs and more — to help calculate the variable sales and cost categories down to the day.

These sales and costs are then compared to daily budget categories, resulting in an accurate, up-to-date budget variance analysis. Since Vinyl stores and displays this data in a relational manner, financial metrics can be displayed in a single intuitive UI, which offers several degrees of granularity for more precise P&L reporting by category or subcategory.

Outcome

More financial transparency and fewer days spent on manual work allowed the team to focus on changing industry conditions

The financial transparency offered by Vinyl has allowed Lucketts Travel to identify and adjust to the ever-changing conditions of the travel industry. It also eliminated the days of manual effort previously required to achieve the same level of analysis.

After building and launching the Finance & Accounting app, the team went on to create more than ten other applications to manage their business, including a Safety and Compliance and Time and Attendance (Payroll Processing) app.