Dreamview Creamery

A Family Vision Turns Into a Thriving Business

Dreamview Creamery, located in the scenic hills of Raglan just outside Hamilton, is a family-run dairy business with a clear mission: provide ethical, sustainable milk products in reusable glass bottles to a growing network of customers across the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Auckland regions.

Founded in November 2017, Dreamview was inspired by a moment Jess Hill had while studying at university. “The original idea came when I was at Uni selling milk at the Lyttelton farmers’ market in Christchurch and thought it would be a cool thing to do in Raglan. When Mum and Dad were down on a visit, I told them ‘You have to come and see what I do’ and they were really keen on doing the same sort of thing.” So once her studies were complete, she returned home and started Dreamview.

“I definitely didn’t realise it was going to be this big,” Jess reflected. Dreamview now has over 3000 customers, with around 120 deliveries in Raglan alone every Monday and Friday. “And that’s just a small part of what we do now,” Jess added.

Driven by values and purpose, Dreamview is more than just a milk supplier. “We say ethically farmed and caring about our environment, our animals and our people. We’ve got 19 employees now and they are what makes Dreamview a family.”

Outgrowing the Tools That Helped Them Start

In the early days, Dreamview operated using, what Jess described as a “real souped up” spreadsheet system. The spreadsheet had been developed by a family friend with IT experience and served its purpose—until the business exploded.

“We just got a crap-tonne more customers,” Jess said, and as order volumes increased, managing money and cash flow became a real problem.

“We were using Xero but you just couldn’t customise it anywhere near what we needed to, to make it fit our business,” Jess reflected. “Plus it just couldn’t handle the volume of customers and doing simple tasks like the bank reconciliations. It was horrible.”

Enter Accredo and Tipako Group

Dreamview’s transformation began with a connection to Ollie Keesing from Tipako Group Ltd, who is a customer of Dreamview himself. ”Yeah, they had been getting milk from us well before we started using Accredo,” Jess said.

With growing pressure and complexity, Ollie recognised the perfect opportunity to implement Accredo. Jess and her team were at a critical crossroads. “We were at that 5-year mark where businesses often thrive or fail and had we not moved to Accredo who knows what would have happened,” Jess stated.

Ollie systematically worked through Dreamviews operational procedures and came up with a plan for an end-to-end seamless solution, from order – to – delivery, using Accredo as the point of truth.

Although the switch came at a time when Dreamview was also building a new, purpose-built factory—funded entirely out of pocket—the team took the leap.

“But here we are 3 years later, thriving, profitable, and with visibility and control over our entire operation” Jess said.

“It’s Honestly Life-Changing”

Accredo didn’t just give Dreamview better reporting—it reshaped how they run the business.

“It’s honestly life-changing. I do probably about 10% of the work on Accredo and Mia our Accounts and Office Manager does the rest. She’s a guru and an absolute whiz on Accredo now.”

Tasks that were once time-consuming and inconsistent are now seamless. “It just meant we could manage money and chase invoices and transactions. Even our accountant can use it and loves it.” Jess said. In fact, “Our accountant looked at a year’s worth of transactions and found over 300,000 for the year”

Optimising Logistics with Tradie On The Move

One of the biggest pain points for Dreamview before switching to using Accredo had been their delivery logistics. “We tried for so long to find a system that could handle the volume of customers and deliveries that each of our trucks would do in a day,” Jess said. “We have over 3,000 customers now and each of our trucks could be doing 60 deliveries a day.”

To solve this, Ollie had suggested Dreamview consider Tradie On The Move, a system that specialises in field-based activities and logistics scheduling plus integrates seamlessly with Accredo. This provides delivery drivers with instant access to the information they need through a simple, intuitive touchscreen interface.

“Even the drivers love having their tablets now. We were a bit worried as some of our drivers are not always the most tech-savvy kind of people But we did it in stages... and they just love them. It’s awesome.”

Streamlining Online Orders

Dreamview also connected their website to Accredo, automating online orders and integrating them into the delivery workflow.

“Seeing someone being able to order on the website and it goes straight into Accredo and on to Tradie On The Move is the coolest thing—giving us a real automated and hands-off process for taking and allocating orders. It’s seamless.”

Before this, Jess was manually entering Sunday night orders. “I’d get like 40 or 50 txt messages then I would go to my email and there would be like another 30. I’d have to sit and download them into the spreadsheet. Now, the only messages are customer queries and all ordering is automated and controlled by the system.”

Data-Driven Decisions, Bottle Tracking & More

Jess’s father and Account Manager, Mia, are passionate about data. “Dad and Mia are very numbers-focused and love data and reports,” Jess said. “Now Dad can ask for information or a report and Mia is able to generate it just like that. Which we never had before.”

Dreamview is even tackling one of their longest-standing logistical issues: bottle returns.

“We’ve started a project to better track returns of bottles,” Jess said. “Previously it ran on an honesty system, but this can result in us losing money on bottles not being returned and having to be replaced.”

Why Accredo? “It Maps to Our Weird Quirks”

Jess has shared her experience with many other business owners. “The amount of people I’ve recommended Ollie and Accredo to is massive.”

She’s clear about what makes it special: “We didn’t like that we needed to take a cookie- cutter approach if using systems like Xero and try to ‘dumb it down’. Accredo takes what’s unique about our business and maps around those operations rather than trying to manage it like any other business.”

And the support? “The team that supports us with Accredo have just been incredible. If anything ever goes wrong, it’s so easy to call Ollie up and get the help we need and a quick fix or pointed in the right direction. That’s actually really hard to come by these days.”

Final Word
Jess sums up Dreamview’s Accredo journey perfectly:

“I’m really glad we stuck at it. We’re really reaping the benefits.”