From the humble beginnings of J.C. (Mac) McHardy’s home, McHardy Vacuum has grown into one of the largest privately owned vacuum and cleaning supply centres in North America. Since 1946, McHardy Vacuum has offered the finest available products and service to their clients. Their professional and knowledgeable staff strives to create a relaxed, peaceful and fun atmosphere. They are committed to not just selling vacuums, but serving their clients as well as their community.

The Outdated System Lost Suction

A small mom and pop store growing from the ground up, McHardy Vacuum was conducting business without a computer system until the 1990’s. For almost 50 years they had been doing their payroll and accounting by hand, which included calculating payroll deductions for each paycheque individually, maintaining the general ledger on paper, and managing their inventory manually.

In order to successfully manage their growing business and lay the foundation for continued success they recognized the need not only to find a solution that would more easily manage the financial accounting and inventory, but also build a system that could accommodate future growth and upgrades of the software solution. Phil McHardy, the current owner of McHardy Vacuum, comments that “our inventory management was cumbersome and time consuming, forcing us to do physical inventory counts in small increments. Not to mention that we had no way to pull all of the accounting information, including payroll, general ledger, point-of-sale, labour and inventory together to gain a full understanding of the financial position of the business at any given time.”

McHardy Vacuum had to build a solution from the ground up to solve their operational challenges. “It wasn’t easy to start from scratch,” Phil reflects. “We found numerous software options that would only offer individual modules, but what we really needed was a comprehensive solution that could integrate all aspects of our business within one system.”

As a result, McHardy Vacuum turned to the experts at P.C. Consulting who were able to offer a well-rounded solution with BusinessVision, which was able to computerize and automate all of the operational functions of the business. McHardy Vacuum was on their way to a spotless operation.

P.C. Consulting Sweeps the Competition

P.C. Consulting was an obvious choice for McHardy Vacuum as they were among the only solution provider that could offer an
all-encompassing, custom-tailored answer that offered the functionality needed for their growing business.

Andrea Bertsch, one of P.C. Consulting’s senior software support specialists, states that “we spent many hours with Phil and the team at McHardy to fully understand their needs. One thing that we soon discovered was that Phil is really passionate about serving his customers and providing superior customer service. With that in mind, we developed several custom reports to make customer information available to them on demand.”

“BusinessVision allows McHardy Vacuum to treat customers unlike any other vacuum store in the country,” McHardy says. “With customer information so easily available we can personally call each of our customers every eighteen months and offer special customer appreciation sales in an effort to treat every customer as though they were family.”

In addition, P.C. Consulting recognized the need for McHardy Vacuum to generate UPC codes for their product line. Again, Bertsch states that “we saw an opportunity to simplify the operation for McHardy by writing a custom report that contains inventory information that their UPC label program uses to print labels. This unique solution combines the point-of-sale, inventory and ordering data within BusinessVision, saving them valuable time and effort.” Phil remarks that “with the numerous custom reports, BusinessVision has become the heart of McHardy’s financial backbone.”

McHardy Vacuum Cleans House with BusinessVision

The team at McHardy vacuum had high expectations that P.C. Consulting would provide a system that could fully integrate all aspects of their business operations and provide them with a greater ability to analyze their financial position, manage and control inventory, and get ready access to customer information. “We would be at a loss today trying to operate our company without BusinessVision and the custom reports that P.C. Consulting provided for us,” says McHardy. “It has enabled our business to grow by leaps and bounds over the last five years. Under the previous system, we would have had to hire at least four additional people just to handle all of the extra paperwork, but we are now able to track inventory in a matter of minutes, saving us anywhere from 45 to 60 hours each week!”

P.C. Consulting offered McHardy Vacuum a full-service solution to their accounting and inventory management challenges. Their partnership continues to thrive and over the next year they plan to implement additional BusinessVision modules; Multi-Warehousing and Bill-of-Material. “There is real value in working with P.C. Consulting to implement the full suite of BusinessVision,” says McHardy. “Our future has never looked brighter as we engage new technologies to maximize our resources and grow our business!”