GWC implementation story

About GWC

The non-profit organisation GWC Regalia Hire provides academic regalia for graduation and school prize-giving events within the Canterbury region, and is overseen by the charity Graduate Women Canterbury.

Initial Challenge

The amount of graduation regalia hired per event combined with the short time of each event resulted in pressure to keep up its pace, especially for events that rent up to the thousands in allocated attire. There was also observing immediately whether any orders did not follow through or if there was attire did not return properly.

The initial setup prior to Ledger also used to have two systems for ordering and scanning; a customer could order clothes through a separate site. There was no connection between ordering on the site and preparing it for the scanning system, resulting in a single-time transfer of orders-to-system which required manual entry if any further hires were needed.

Ledger Implementation

The rebuild of the system under Ledger made various changes, resulting in a more streamlined Issue and Return workflow for graduation hire:

• Live Ordering - A live ordering system; users renting regalia on an external site immediately logs these orders onto Ledger without having to check and manually write new hire orders in.
• Bulk Returning - A return point where lent orders can come back, and can be bulk-scanned using a mobile hand scanner, rapidly identifying what has or hasn't come back properly and allowing faster actioning.
• Event Progress Tracking - The ability to monitor and track the status of orders as events progress in real time.

This has resulted in the tracking of regalia hire over multiple events, with cases of almost up to 10,000 items of regalia rented, allocated and returned over several days such as the 2026 Autumn Graduation of the University of Canterbury.

Related: Issue and Return and Graduation and Regalia.