Whether you’re on a road trip across the South Island or a local on your way home, the Sheffield Pie Shop is a must-visit destination whenever you find yourself in Sheffield.
Made onsite with fresh, local ingredients by local bakers, the Sheffield Pie Shop offers an extensive pie range with everything from the classic Steak and Cheese to the delectable Chicken and Apricot. A recent addition to the range, Venison and Whiskey Relish, has been a fan favourite over the summer holiday period.
The Sheffield Pie Shop is run by passionate lifelong bakers Shane and Loretta Paterson who bought the business in 2002 and never looked back. Since then, they have expanded their product range, increased efficiency, and opened a new café and bakery in Oxford. Last year, they renovated and expanded the Oxford store, growing their storage and production facilities and refurbishing the café. They’ve won awards in the New Zealand Pie Awards four years in a row.
But it’s not all about the numbers. For Shane and Loretta, it’s about people. They hire locals with a passion for baking that rivals their own, and one of their key focuses is creating a welcoming environment for locals and travellers alike. “We want the shop to be a place where people meet, have a hot cuppa and home-style food and feel welcome,” Loretta explained.
Running such an iconic business requires time, tenacity and teamwork. Recently, Loretta decided she wanted to spend more time in the bakery than on billing and budgets. So, she brought in Georgia Goodman, Division Manager at LP Assist, to set up accounting software and streamline bookkeeping operations.
After a series of discussions with Loretta and her team, LP Assist recommended setting up Xero and Hubdoc, which make uploading, tracking and reconciling financial information easy. This also enabled Shane and Loretta to easily access and comprehend their financial data, looking at the performance of the Sheffield location compared to the Oxford café, examining where costs could be decreased and efficiencies realised.
With the new accounting software systems set up, the LP Assist team transitioned to helping streamline the Sheffield Pie Shop’s bill management. Now, Loretta simply sends snapshots of bills to Hubdoc whenever they come in. Tineka Johnston, Bookkeeper at LP Assist, processes them in Xero, allocating them to the correct part of the business, and turns out a tidy list of all bills to be paid on the 20th of each month. This process-driven, detail-orientated approach is part of why Loretta enjoys working with LP Assist.
“Bookkeeping is not my forte, so after years of plugging my way through it, I now feel confident that when it comes time to pay my bills, everything is under control and I don’t need to worry,” Loretta said. “Now I don’t have to separately go through each bill and pay it, it’s amazing to get the whole list and just pay everything in one go. And Tineka is quick, efficient and great at reminding me when something needs to be done. Working with LP Assist gives me that extra bit of time and has made life a lot easier.”
