Eureka Solutions is already a £4.5 million-a-year firm thanks to its expertise in rolling out and customising some of the world’s biggest accountancy and business management software tools.

Now, it is on the brink of significant growth as its own proprietary software has smashed its early targets, delivering huge productivity benefits to clients in the fast-growing ecommerce sector.

The firm’s Cloud Data Exchange, (CDE), tool enables vital but separate systems to talk to each other and latest figures show that across 2021 it was estimated to have saved each of its customers an average of 630 hours in lost productivity.

Gillian Livingstone, chief operating officer at Eureka Solutions in East Kilbride, said: “Time is the one thing that all of our clients wish they had more of – and we are giving them it.

“When it comes to ecommerce businesses, the efficiencies delivered by CDE speak for themselves. During 2021 the software handled almost 13 million transactions, saving around 75,000 hours that would have been needed to input that data manually.

“Our clients are freed up from error-prone processes that soak up staff time, which means their people can focus on being more productive, efficient and solving issues for their customers. Instant access to accurate business data at any time means they see other benefits, from faster order fulfilment to better stock management.”

Eureka Solutions has invested heavily in developing CDE, which is entirely cloud based, meaning clients do not need any downloads or updates. It works for any size of business, whether a one-person operation needing data transferred once a week, or bigger firms needing data updated every 30 seconds. It’s customisable and requires no specialist coding knowledge.

Operational for several years, and based on the principles of the firm’s hugely popular, long-established ‘Data Exchange’ solution, the upgraded ‘cloud’ product was officially taken to market in January 2021 and the figures for the 12 months since then have exceeded the firm’s targets. During 2021 it handled 12,936,781 transactions that otherwise would have required human intervention.

With 119 clients already bought into the system, its biggest month was November 2021 when CDE handled 1,676,983 transactions as online retailers dealt with the rush of Black Friday and Christmas shoppers.

Now the firm expects to benefit from the ongoing pandemic-driven move to ecommerce, with countless new businesses springing up, while traditional retailers accelerate the move online.

Gillian Livingstone added: “This is an important time for us. Many of those new and developing ecommerce businesses are going to find that the data black hole between different systems is a blight that will stifle their growth. We are the answer to those problems.”

Typically, online businesses are built on ecommerce platforms, including Magento by Adobe, Shopify and WooCommerce. While those deliver an excellent experience for the shopper, retailers hit problems because the website software does not integrate with accounting packages like Sage or Xero, or with business management software like Salesforce.

Lara Fitches, sales manager with CDE, said: “Pretty much every business will use a well-known accounting software package, but they simply don’t speak to the ecommerce platforms. That means that every time a customer places an order online, a member of staff will have to sit and manually type that information into their book-keeping or accountancy software.

“That may involve inputting the customer’s name, address and order details, with a major risk of simple human error getting into the system. Then someone also needs to manually adjust stock levels and upload them back to the website. If they are doing that 20 to 100 times a day it is a full-time job for someone. CDE makes all of this happen automatically.

“We have clients selling specialist products online and they may only get five orders a day. Yet it simply isn’t worth their time doing it manually because it keeps them away from making and shipping the products they are passionate about. Then we have the more mass-market clients selling thousands of items each day, where the benefits of automation simply can’t be contested.”

As software integration experts with decades of experience – particularly with Sage and with the global business software package, Oracle NetSuite, Eureka Solutions sees global potential for CDE. Among its 65 staff are dedicated CDE developers, who constantly update it.

CDE enables a host of vital business information to be automatically imported or exported, including invoices, sales orders, purchase orders, stock updates and products that otherwise would have to be done by hand.

Ms Fitches added: “We are working on the product every single day. If a customer requests a new feature, we deliver that wherever possible. We are getting asked for new connectors every day, building out the portfolio of systems we can help clients integrate with.”