July 2009

environmentally friendly bus service stays green and facilitates growth with Albany Software

The Green Bus facilitates its rapid expansion while sustaining its green credentials with ALBACS

The Green Bus, a bespoke school bus service, has selected ALBACS from market leading e-transaction software author Albany Software to streamline its business processes, reducing paper in order to stay committed to its green strategy and facilitate its rapid expansion. The order of the automated e-payment platform will comprehensively manage The Green Bus' hundreds of monthly transactions, affording the company a more controlled and fluid cash flow, improving time and cost efficiency, allowing accurate forecasting for growth and reducing carbon footprint.

Albany Software's ALBACS will eliminate the costly, time-consuming paper-based methods of traditional funds transfer previously used by The Green Bus allowing the company to completely automate their payments. Ian Mack, Managing Director of The Green Bus comments, "We previously used a system where we had to manually create a file for each of our payments each month, which involved a huge amount of wasted time, cost and paper. We can now use ALBACS to do the same transactions repetitively each month without any manual labour." Mack continues, "ALBACS allows us to bring the control of all our payments back into the business, streamlining all of our processes."

The Green Bus provides bus services that are tailor-made for pupils and particular school trips, with the continuing aim to get cars off the roads and encourage people to switch to bus transport. The Green Bus also hires out its services during the day for school excursions, saving the need for several hundred separate car journeys every day.

The ongoing success and expansion of The Green Bus means that the new solution from Albany Software will accommodate and facilitate the steep upward growth curve the business is experiencing. Mack explains, "We've got 1500 customers and the Albany system is making everything much quicker and easier for us to manage. The whole point of The Green Bus is that we're trying to make it scalable - we have 23 services now and we'll have 37 by next year. We need to have efficient systems so that our growth isn't impeded by old-fashioned, time-consuming software." He continues, "The ALBACS system is making everything more manageable; it's really at the centre of the finance element of our growth."

With Albany's ALBACS software, The Green Bus can ensure that their payments are as secure and accurate as possible; something which is imperative to the company in terms of customer service. Mack comments, "When performing repetitive work, errors can creep in. However, by submitting the same file each month via an automated system, the chances of errors are greatly reduced." He concludes, "It's really important that we uplift our direct debits quickly and accurately - more than anything customer service is really at the heart of our growth and expansion."

Following the successful implementation of ALBACS, The Green Bus plans to roll out the software throughout the rest of the company, including payroll for staff payments.

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