White House Gardens Case Study

It is often amazing to see how entrepreneurs hard work, and passion, allows them to gladly work 80 hours per week in order to avoid the typical 40-hour corporate workweek. No one could be a better example of this than Chris with White House Gardens. Chris had a rich background in commercial landscaping and quickly recognized that a need existed in the marketplace for high-quality garden art products for both commercial and residential landscapes. Once Chris started White House Gardens, his business quickly became a retailer with the largest selection of fountains, statues, and planters in the Eastern United States. White House Gardens offers beautiful fountains, statues, planters, birdbaths, and outdoor furniture that will transform any ordinary garden into a serene sanctuary.

The Challenges:

When we first met Chris, his accounting was being handled using manual processes, financial information was basically collected on a yearly basis for tax reporting compliance purposes. This manual process did not give Chris the necessary tools needed to see how White House Gardens was progressing towards its financial goals. Just like the vast majority of entrepreneurs we meet, Chris had a passion for Garden Art, but detested accounting and managing the books.

The Solutions:

Chris contacted Polaris Tax and Accounting to discuss how he could completely outsource the accounting to our firm. Our priority was to transition White House Gardens to Xero, our cloud accounting platform, allowing both our firm and management within the business to access the same information in real time. Once the accounting was transitioned to Xero, we showed Chris how to navigate and use Xero effectively to gather important information to better manage his day to day accounting. Since Chris does travel a significant amount of time to meet with vendors and suppliers, it was very important for him to access his business accounting on the go. Since Xero is a cloud-based accounting system, Chris can access White House Garden’s accounting records from any internet connected device.

Polaris updates White House’s accounting information daily so Chris can sign in to Xero and use the intuitive dashboard to see his current business banking information and generate real-time financial statements. Once White House’s accounting was fully transitioned to Xero we suggested for Chris to use Harvest as an invoicing add-on to eliminate the need for manual tickets. Harvest allows to easily track time spent per project and provides an intuitive platform to invoice clients and analyze job costs, all important aspects that can help White House remain competitive in the garden art retail industry.

Today, White House is growing and planning a major expansion, in fact, White House Gardens is establishing a new division of wholesale pottery and expansion in Florida and other southern states within the United States. We are excited to see White House Gardens grow in a multi-location retail business so that Chris can share with customers across the Southern United States his passion, love, and relaxing therapeutically benefits of his garden art. Thanks to real-time cloud accounting Chris can spend more time focusing on what he truly loves doing, and less time worrying about managing his accounting.