Lakehouse

About the company

Lakehouse is an award-winning property and energy services provider, established in 1988 they employ over 1200 staff. The company specialises in construction and maintenance in the social housing, education and public buildings sectors, with a service offering which covers construction, regeneration and refurbishment, repairs and maintenance, insulation and retrofit, renewable energy, gas servicing and maintenance, and fire safety and security systems.

In recent years, Lakehouse has acquired four successful businesses which have enabled the expansion of its service offering. In October 2011 Lakehouse acquired K&T Heating Services, followed by Allied Protection in November 2012 and Foster Property Maintenance in October 2013.

In April 2014, Everwarm joined the Lakehouse Group, expanding its geographical reach into Scotland and broadening the range of energy services it provides to clients and communities.

Challenges

• Lakehouse became a group of companies and all used to prepare budgets using a normal excel solution and linked spreadsheets. This set up was difficult and never really worked, it couldn’t keep up with the fact that the company was growing.

• The forecast process was quite lengthy and time-consuming. It would involve constant emailing back and forth, having people spend days on it and cutting and pasting and then rechecking values.

The Result

• Common platform for all users in the company across the group.
  Having one source of data which enabled multiple users working on the same version of the budget or even the same data.
• Easier and faster budget process.
  More discipline over the rules that go into the budget, becoming more formalised so not relying on spreadsheets.