Crownhill Gardens is one of the UK's leading premium outdoor furniture : 15,000 sq ft in Crews Hill, Enfield, open seven days a week, stocking over 300 products from Nova Outdoor Living, Bramblecrest, and Leisuregrow, alongside pergola systems, hot tubs, and BBQs. They had outgrown their spreadsheets. Not because the spreadsheets were badly built (they were actually impressively structured) but because the business had grown to the point where a customer, their order, their delivery, their invoice, and their warranty all needed to live in one connected place. We built that in days. It's been live and trading since.
The business ran on a set of well-maintained Excel spreadsheets with formulas handling stock valuation, order tracking, and pricing. They worked, up to a point. The problem was connection. When a customer placed an order, the order existed in one spreadsheet, the customer in another, the delivery schedule in a third, and the invoice template was a Word document populated by hand. When something changed (the customer's address, the delivery date, the deposit amount) it had to be updated in three or four places. When the owner wanted to know which brands were driving the most revenue, or which products were selling slowly, someone had to compile it manually.
The business had grown beyond what a collection of spreadsheets, however well-built, could manage as a connected whole. They needed one system where everything knew about everything else.
Orders are linked to customers directly in the data model, not by a customer name field that might drift from the customer record, but by a typed relationship. Find a customer: see all their orders, past and present. Open an order: the customer record is right there. Balance outstanding, deposit paid, VAT calculated automatically. Notes from previous interactions. The full history.
The product catalogue holds every item in the showroom with current pricing, supplier, brand, category, and stock count. When staff build an order, they search the catalogue and add line items, pricing populated automatically from the current catalogue, not from memory or a printed list. Stock levels update as orders are processed. Low-stock alerts surface on the dashboard.
Invoices, proformas, sales orders, quotes, and warranty disclaimers are generated from live order data in one click. No copying numbers across from one document to another. No risk of the invoice showing a different deposit than the sales order. The document is built from the order at the moment of generation, using the current data.
Deliveries are scheduled and allocated to drivers directly within the system. The delivery calendar shows what's going out, to where, with which driver. Customers can be notified. Delivery status updates flow back into the order record. When something changes, a postponement or a partial delivery, it is recorded against the order without paper notes that get lost.
Purchase orders to suppliers are raised within the system and tracked through goods receiving. When stock arrives, the purchase order is closed and the catalogue count updates. The gap between what's been ordered from suppliers and what's been received is visible at a glance.
Crownhill sells and installs aluminium . Pergola systems are a different kind of transaction that requires site surveys, installation scheduling, compliance documents, and warranty registration. This has its own module within the system, connected to the order and the customer but with its own workflow and document generation.
A live dashboard shows the operational state of the business: active orders by stage, pending deliveries, open purchase orders, stock alerts. The insights section shows revenue trends, top-selling products, brand performance, customer geography, stock velocity, and repeat customer patterns, derived from live data, not from a monthly export into a spreadsheet.
Years of customer history, order records, and product data existed in the previous spreadsheets. Before the new system went live, that data was imported cleanly: customers, products, historical orders, and all. The team started on day one with their full history visible in the new system. There was no "clean break" that discarded years of accumulated business knowledge.
ESRE Media runs its entire pipeline, partner network, and commission tracking on a system we built ourselves, on the same graph architecture. We are growing fast, and if you know organisations that need better digital systems, referral partners earn 15% on project delivery.
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