Robbins Timber
From Bristol Docks to real-time dashboards: 144 years of timber, one new system
Robbins Timber has been trading from Bristol since 1881, when the company set up shop at Bristol Docks supplying timber to a city built on shipping and trade.
The business has long since moved a few miles south to its current home on the Ashton Vale Trading Estate.
Alongside the marine side sits a general timber operation with its own milling and planing facilities, capable of turning out a fully bespoke profile to order rather than just selling what's on the shelf. It's a business that has always done two slightly different jobs under one roof - and that variety is exactly what makes back-office software interesting (or painful) for a company like Robbins.
For years, that back office ran on our earlier system, UniTrade360. When the time came to upgrade, Robbins made the move to Merchanter.
"It's a very flexible, mouldable, bespoke system. For independents and smaller merchants with a few branches, I think it's well suited."
Laura Bagnall, Director, Robbins Timber
The challenge
A business that's been trading since the Victorian era doesn't take changing systems lightly.
The team at Robbins knew UniTrade360 inside out - every workaround, every shortcut, every quirk learned over years of daily use.
Familiarity is comfortable, but it also has a cost: when pricing, stock and customer data are all moving at the speed (or lack of speed) of the old system, change starts to feel a lot like extra admin.
Three things stood out as ready for an upgrade.
Visibility was the first: management couldn't easily see what was happening across the trade counter and back office as it happened, only after the fact.
Pricing was the second - discounts and customer-specific rates were tracked largely in people's heads and on paperwork rather than enforced automatically, which works fine until someone's on holiday or a new starter is on the till.
And the connection to Sage was the third, with data moving between systems via manual transfer rather than a live link.
None of this is unique to timber merchants, but Robbins' product range made it tougher. Marine plywood, hardwood, softwood, sheet material, bespoke mouldings - a catalogue with this much range and this many pricing arrangements needs a system built to handle complexity, not fight it.
How Merchanter helped
Watching the business move in real time
The most immediate shift the team noticed wasn't a single feature so much as a change in vantage point. With Merchanter's trade and retail sales tools, a manager can watch a quote turn into an order and ripple through into the day's figures, almost as it happens.
"From a management point of view, it's just so easy to see what people are doing - almost second by second. You can see they've done a draft quote, and that they've converted it to an order. The transparency of the data, and how it's presented, is completely different. The information's there, and you can easily navigate around it." - Laura Bagnall
Pricing that remembers, so people don't have to
Robbins' customer base spans boatbuilders after a few sheets of marine ply, regular trade accounts buying in bulk, and everyone in between - each with their own agreed pricing built up over years. Previously, applying the right rate to the right customer depended on someone remembering the arrangement or digging through paperwork.
Merchanter's customer management tools fix that by letting each customer be allocated to a price band, set across their whole account or tailored product by product. Once it's in the system, it applies itself.
"We're right in the middle of price band structuring. Every time a customer buys something, we take the paperwork and allocate them to certain price bands - so next time they buy, it's already set up. That's proving to be very useful for us. It's automation of sales, really." - Ben Bagnall
It's a small administrative shift with a real commercial upside: consistent pricing protects margin in a way that relying on memory at the trade counter never quite manages to.
A straight line to Sage
Robbins runs its accounts through Sage, and the old setup meant someone, somewhere, was regularly moving data between systems by hand. Merchanter's direct Sage integration removes that step, so trading activity reaches the accounts team without a manual file transfer in between.
"The new system is automatically linked to Sage, rather than having to manually pull files across, giving us more timely financial information." - Laura Bagnall
It's the kind of change that doesn't make headlines, but removes a job nobody enjoyed doing anyway.
Quicker at the counter, quicker on payment
Order processing has sped up too, simply because finding the right product takes less effort than it used to.
"Putting an order on is a lot more efficient, because it's so much easier to search and find products. Once you can navigate the system, it's very easy to put quantities and sizes in." - Laura Bagnall
At the till, Merchanter's link to PaymentSense card machines has made taking payment faster too - a small thing on a quiet day, and a extremely useful one on a busy morning at the trade counter.
"We're hooked up to the card machines - that went surprisingly well. It's much quicker, and very slick." - Laura Bagnall
Unlearning the old system
Switching systems after years on UniTrade360 isn't instant, and Ben didn't pretend otherwise.
"It takes a few months just to get back to where you were with your old system. We're past that now - we're trained up, we're using it, and it's going well. Now we're starting to take advantage of the new elements it brings." - Ben Bagnall
The harder part wasn't learning Merchanter, but unlearning the instinct to compare it to what came before.
"I think that was a bit of a culture change for us - to stop comparing, because they're two very different systems. The battle is against 'why doesn't it do what it used to do?' And the answer is, it does - it just does it in a slightly different, and often better, way. But you need to open your mind to that, rather than try to force it to do what the old system did." - Ben Bagnall
Fortunately, the structured support period after go-live helped bridge that gap.
"You have your two-week period where the project team are entirely focussed on you, and I think that's critical - you need that with any new system. You gradually get weaned off that, and then you're supported by the helpdesk. That's quite a smart system, actually - it's well put together." - Ben Bagnall
What's next for Robbins?
With day-to-day sales and pricing now running smoothly on Merchanter, Robbins is turning its attention to stock control - never a simple job for a merchant carrying random-width hardwoods alongside uniform sheet material.
Down the line, the team is also looking at the milling and processing tools to speed up ticket printing on repeat stock items, building on a milling operation that's been part of the business since long before anyone currently on the team joined it.
Start with a conversation
Robbins has been trading since 1881, runs marine and general timber side by side, and has full milling on top. Not every merchant carries that much going on - but if you do, Merchanter is built for it. And if your business is simpler, that just means you'll be up and running with all of it even faster.
Book a call to talk through how your business runs today, and what Merchanter could do with it.
