"Our financial and operational reporting and analysis would be extremely difficult without Monarch... Any organization involved in retailing, manufacturing (or) franchising... should have Monarch as part of their technology toolkit... I can't imagine working without it!"

Hannoush Jewelers, headquartered in Springfield, MA, is a national retailer of fine jewelry with over 75 stores throughout the U.S. The company is also a manufacturer and franchiser as well. Keeping track of these different business operations is no simple task, but Terri Strandberg, Controller for Hannoush Jewelers, has found Monarch to be gem of a solution for easy data access and analysis, without programming.

"Before Monarch, the company was printing a lot of paper reports, and I was frequently rekeying data from our enterprise system into Excel," Terri says. "But now, thanks to Monarch, mining data buried in our reports is a snap."

"Monarch is my 'go-to' data solution, to view and use our business data in sensible ways, to identify and address problems quickly."

A longtime user of Monarch, Terri found Monarch extremely easy to learn. "Monarch truly is designed for anyone, regardless of their technical skill level, to easily access the data they need."

It is important to note that Hannoush Jewelers is much more than a retailer of jewelry. "We also manufacture much of the jewelry we sell, and many of our stores are franchised," says Terri. "We use a custom enterprise information system to integrate the management of all three of these operations. However, our financial and operational reporting and analysis would be extremely difficult without Monarch."

Keeping track of the financial operations of over 75 stores is a lot easier for Terri with Monarch at her disposal. "I use Monarch to reconcile data between accounting reports and inventory reports, export data to Excel for month-end reporting, and use Monarch to mine data from our A/R aging report to help manage receivables," says Terri.

"Our Item Sales Report contains the details for our monthly sales by location, by department, by salesperson, and more, down to the individual item. Monarch lets me view, filter and summarize the data in a variety of ways. Performance comparisons between stores are easy using Monarch.

"I also use Monarch with this report to view only certain transactions, such as customer returns by salesperson, or sales to employees, to safeguard against possible fraudulent transactions. I also created calculated fields in Monarch to identify any low margin sales.

"Monarch's summary capabilities are very useful for me as well. I bring the item sales data into Monarch's summary view so I can drill up and drill down into the sales detail, by department, by store, and more, and export data to Excel at any time. This level of analysis would be extremely difficult without Monarch."

Terri also uses Monarch with the company's new time and attendance system. "I am using Monarch to mine data from our employee attendance reports, to quickly identify and correct any erroneous data, perform actual versus scheduled hours of work, and perform overtime analysis," Terri says.

"Any organization involved in retailing, manufacturing, franchising, or all of the above, should have Monarch as part of their technology toolkit to more easily and effectively manage operations," Terri adds. "I can't imagine working without it!"

Hannoush Jewelers Finds Monarch a Gem of a Data Access and Analysis Solution