Sound Leisure, a family business that has manufactured hand-crafted jukeboxes at its Leeds factory for 40 years, has reported a surge in productivity and business efficiencies after securing £5,000 of digital technology funding for its pub jukeboxes division.

The funding part-financed a new software system that has vastly improved the way £5m turnover Sound Leisure’s team of collectors for its coin-operated jukeboxes communicate with the firm’s engineers and Leeds head office. The new system is expected to deliver an increase in turnover of around £150,000 a year.

With an outdated method of manually reporting the sums collected from the more than 800 jukeboxes at venues across the north and Midlands, and an ageing software system, Sound Leisure successfully applied for funding from the Government-backed Digital Enterprise programme in 2017.

The scheme, which helps businesses in the Leeds City Region upgrade their digital technology, awarded the Leeds business £5,000 towards a £12,500 new software system that has revolutionised the way it collects cash from its machines.

“We have gone from a slow, manual system of collecting and recording financial data, which would take days for us to be able to collate back at head office, to this amazing high-tech software,” said Sound Leisure director Mike Black.

“The new system centralises and digitises everything so that information flows instantly to and from our engineers, who deal with service issues, and our collectors, via hand-held tablet devices. At the same time we get all the information at head office immediately so that we can deliver an improved service for our customers, saving time and money and making everything run more efficiently.”

Sound Leisure employs 80 people at its Leeds production facility and a further five staff in Nottingham. As well as supplying its digital and vinyl jukeboxes to pubs and venues, it also sells them to private clients around the world, and has produced more than 100,000 machines at its Leeds factory since it started out in 1978.

Muz Mumtaz, who heads the Digital Enterprise programme said: “It is fantastic that this successful business which is crafting these timeless but extremely high-tech products in Leeds and exporting them worldwide, has been able to make significant increases in efficiency with this new software system in place.

“Digital Enterprise is designed to help businesses like Sound Leisure take important steps that will enable them to grow by boosting their digital technology. We’re really excited to have been able to help Mike and the team secure the funding for this innovatiove piece of kit.”