How Cashel Blue replaced
a complex Excel + macros
operation with Keystone —
in thirty days.

Ireland's most-awarded farmhouse blue cheese had outgrown spreadsheets. Variable-weight wheels, retailer-specific code mapping, batch traceability and split-batch dispatch all lived in increasingly fragile Excel macros. This is the story of how that operation was rebuilt on Keystone — and the numbers behind it.

From a Tipperary creamery
to international markets.

Cashel Blue's operational footprint is the reason Keystone is built the way it is. A complex internal product range with every export customer mapped to its own private-label SKU, branding and packaging combination. Dispatched across an international export footprint on three continents. The complexity isn't optional — it's the work. Cashel Blue^® and Crozier Blue^® are registered trademarks of J&L Grubb Ltd; operational footprint cited with written permission.

A bespoke Excel-and-macros operation
that nearly worked.

Louis Clifton Brown, QA & Operations Manager at Cashel Blue, had built the operational backbone of the dairy in Excel. It worked — but the cracks were visible. Variable-weight orders had to be re-typed twice. Customer-specific product codes — every export market with its own private-label SKU, branding and packaging — lived in a lookup tab that one staff member maintained by hand. Batch traceability ran across three workbooks that had to be reconciled at month-end.

• Retailer pressure — increasing demand for faster trace responses to compliance queries and tighter dispatch documentation standards.
• BRC Issue 9 §5.4 upgrade — supply-chain traceability evidence had to be defensible inside 60 minutes, not 3 hours.
• Operational succession — Louis was building an even more advanced Excel + macros set-up. The team realised the operational logic shouldn't live in one head and one workbook.
• AccountsIQ limitations — the team explored extending the accounting package to handle batch traceability. The conclusion: keep operational data separate, integrate the two systems where it adds value.

Live in 30 days.
The numbers, the workflow, the day-one experience.

Implementation started January 2026. The full team — owners Sarah and Sergio Furno, Louis on QA, the dispatch team — gave us 90 minutes a week. We did the data extraction, the customer code mapping, the dispatch templates, the AccountsIQ sync configuration. Cashel Blue went live on Keystone in February 2026 with zero production downtime.

Six product features
that exist because of this customer.

Every artisan dairy is operationally specific. The features below were built by us in direct response to floor-team feedback at Cashel Blue, and now ship as standard for every Keystone customer who follows them.

1. Variable-weight batch capture. Wheels are weighed individually; the system reconciles to the dispatched line automatically.
2. Retailer code mapping with reverse lookup. One internal SKU → many retailer-specific codes, searchable in either direction.
3. Split-batch dispatch. One order can pull from multiple batches; trace records on both sides match automatically.
4. Use-by tracking by batch. Production date in, use-by out — no manual recalculation, no hand-typed labels.
5. AccountsIQ two-way sync. Customers and credits flow in; dispatch-completed invoices flow out. Operations and accounts stay separate but reconciled.
6. Global dispatch search. Document number search across the whole pipeline (the actual feature request that started it: Louis emailing about needing to find a dispatch note in a busy week).