Karen Hulatt is Finance Office Manager at Gloucestershire College and in 2007 the college decided to take their catering in-house and Karen says they needed help to do that.

How we started

The Learning Skills Council recommended Pelican who came and did their benchmarking exercise, and demonstrated to Karen that they could deliver significant savings. The Pelican's account manager impressed us a lot," says Karen. "We were completely new to in- house catering and suddenly it was open season with access to all these suppliers. Pelican really helped us get it all set up, and as time has gone on we've changed the arrangements to suit our needs.

We have multiple sites and multiple outlets, and the team is brilliant about setting up all the many accounts we needed. It's important for us to be able to see our income and expenditure against the different outlets, so the costs are going to the right one. They deliver the statements in a clear and simple format and it makes it much easier to manage.

Saving time & money

We would get 500 invoices a month from Pelican suppliers so without the central billing service our workload would be 50% higher. We'd need extra clerks, so it really saves us money.

On-going support

If we have any issues we contact the team and they get straight onto it. They manage a lot of queries for us. We didn't realise when we started out how many suppliers we were going to end up paying through central billing - it's really grown over the years.

The contract management is significant so we have monthly review meetings, and they've always been willing to do that. They never hesitated at coming all the way out here, and you never get the impression you're asking too much. We genuinely wouldn't have been able to manage without them."

"Without the central billing service our workload would be 50% higher, so it really saves us money"

Karen Hulatt, Finance Office Manager
Gloucestershire College