.svg)
Overcome the NFP sector’s unique challenges and streamline the way your accounting team, fundraisers and volunteers work. AccountsIQ allows you to achieve transparency, consistency and SORP compliance with slick, digital processes and low cost of ownership.
Gain full transparency with detailed expenses tracking, linked to funds and easily segregate income streams. Work with our platform experts to create your unique, multi-dimensional coding framework and set up the exact reporting you need.
Swap costly upgrades, expensive hardware and heavy implementation costs for one single affordable monthly subscription. Built in the cloud, AccountsIQ integrates seamlessly with other apps, allowing you to streamline processes, reduce errors and save time.
Transform the way you work with AccountsIQ’s automated processes. Spend more time on strategic work and less on repetitive administrative tasks. Go digital with approvals, expenses, bank feeds, reconciliation, document storage, FX, consolidation and more.
This multi-dimensional reporting is perfect for our setting. It has revolutionised our potential to do our job here in the centre. That is to stand over these charitable funds and know exactly what’s going on with the funds of each charity.
”
After evaluating four charity accounting software products, AccountsIQ was selected for American Chamber of Commerce, because of its clear, simple and intuitive way of working.
Anne Somerville, Financial Controller & Company Secretary at American Chamber of Commerce Ireland started looking for accounting software in late 2016 to replace their TAS system, now part of Sage.
The organisation is a not for profit membership organisation representing both US companies in Ireland and Irish companies with businesses in the US.
They wanted to find an efficiently priced, user friendly and intuitive system that could help them conduct their business transactions and develop their reporting structures and were delighted when they found AccountsIQ.
Anne knew her organisation needed an accounting system suitable for charities that was easy to use, efficient and effective, giving them the custom reporting functionality they required. As her team was not always sitting at a desk, Anne was interested in what a cloud solution could offer.
The problem with their old system was that it was clunky to use and was time consuming in the reporting functionality. It was cumbersome to extract the data or get the level of reporting required, even though the transaction volumes were not large. They would spend a lot of time downloading data into Excel and ‘playing with it’ to get the information in the format they needed.
After evaluating four charity accounting software products, AccountsIQ was selected, because of its clear, simple and intuitive way of working.
Originally Anne felt they should complete their year end reporting and audit before looking to implement the new system. However, 4 months into their search for a new accounting system, AccountsIQ was implemented and ready to use for their new financial year starting January 1st, six months ahead of their expectations.
AccountsIQ has been in use for 7 months now and Anne has found month end reporting a vast improvement:
AccountsIQ is really excellent. It’s intuitive, simple to use and the implementation was outstanding. Now we have complete transparency and visibility of our financials. We can easily drill down to individual transactions and even down to items on an individual invoice without having to pull out any invoices or back-ups.
AccountsIQ’s implementation team helped design and create a set of customised reports for Anne, which she adds:
The reporting is high quality, AccountsIQ has created a set of custom reports for us and it’s very simple now to extract the information we need. It’s a vast improvement on what we had before and I can see the long-term benefits of the system being invaluable for our organisation.
Another key benefit of AccountsIQ is that it has been integrated with their bank accounts, which enables them to manage all payments and receipts online directly with the bank and download all bank transaction data directly and post automatically to AccountsIQ and complete bank reconciliations seamlessly.
The plan is now to implement the AccountsIQ Approval Workflow module to automate approval of purchase orders and invoices. The final phase is to integrate with the organisation’s CRM system, which will enable the team to look up customer details, see balances etc from within the CRM, without having to log into the finance system.
Innovative approach to multi-dimensional reporting killer AccountsIQ feature for Arts charity, Artichoke Trust
Artichoke Trust is a charitable organisation which works with artists to create large-scale public art events across the UK. Artichoke’s ambitious outdoor art projects include the Lumiere light festivals and Antony Gormley’s One & Other Fourth Plinth commission. As a charity managing multiple projects at once, each with varying budgets and funding sources, Artichoke Trust has unique accounting requirements when it comes to project accounting which need to be SORP compliant. In particular, it requires a granular level of detail to ensure accurate recording of core project costs as well as the ability to record project costs against phases.
Neil Goulder, Director of Finance & Operations at Artichoke Trust, had been using Sage Financials as his accounting tool but admits it had a “number of serious shortcomings”. When he learned of Sage’s plan to withdraw the product, it was an opportunity to look around for alternatives which might better fit his particular requirements in Project Accounting and provide the structure he needs for SORP compliance. Neil says,
I started to look for a good Cloud-based replacement that is strong on dimensional reporting and analysis codes. Among a dozen candidates was AccountsIQ. I took a peek at a demo system and really liked it. Great, scalable product, with an innovative approach to multi-dimensional coding.
Strong dimensional analysis is key for Neil. AccountsIQ allows for up to six customisable dimensions linked to a unique BI code, plus an infinite number of codes that can be assigned to each dimension. Reporting is possible across all dimensions and codes. AccountsIQ’s key strength is that only valid permutations of Analysis Codes can be used when data is input, which significantly reduces the risk of human error when it comes to tracking costs. Neil explains,
Dimensions are really important to us. We looked at Sage 50, but that only had two dimensions. We needed at least four, covering cost centres; projects; project phases; and individual light installations. There are some very expensive systems which can do it but there aren’t many affordable systems which offer this level of flexibility. That was an absolute ‘must’ from our point of view. AccountsIQ is the only product I’ve seen that allows you to create these ‘conditional’ dimensions.
AccountsIQ features an automated bank reconciliation functionality that has helped Neil speed up the period end reconciliation process.
I really like the way the Bank Rec module works. The system with Sage Financials was so overcomplicated we never used it and worked in spreadsheets instead. AccountsIQ is very straightforward. I like the way it recognises past transactions and fills in as much of the information as it can, which really speeds up the process.
Neil is able to upload paperwork against transactions which makes it much easier to provide information to auditors and also facilitate a mostly paperless environment. Ultimately, AccountsIQ enables Neil to keep all of his data in one place, largely automated, without the need for other spreadsheets or manual processes.
With smart use of the dimensions coding structure, I can get every piece of information needed into AccountsIQ so that I don’t have to maintain control accounts manually in Excel. It saves us a huge amount of time.
AccountsIQ’s Excel Add-in offers further efficiencies for Neil, allowing him to use a real-time data link from AccountsIQ to create tables in Excel which are fed into the SORP compliant statutory accounts prepared in Word. This means updates are refreshed instantly as changes are made to Statutory accounts.
AccountsIQ is brilliant at accommodating the structure needed for the SORP. We pull the information into our format live from AccountsIQ through Excel. It’s an incredibly quick and efficient process.
Having initially set an ambitious release target of two weeks, Neil was able to implement AccountsIQ at Artichoke Trust in a record-breaking two days. This was in large part due to Neil’s own tenacity in getting to grips with the BI codes and how they could best be mapped to his needs. AccountsIQ’s development team gave Neil access to a test system so he could model the BI codes before going live. He had also exported and cleaned the static data from his old accounting system such as customer information, bank account details, and the nominal ledger structure. This level of preparation allowed Neil to go live with AccountsIQ so quickly. He says,
I hoped we might break all records and implement it in a fortnight as our new accounting year started on the First of April. I signed a contract Wednesday morning and we went live at 4:30 the next day.
The elements that have really made a difference are AccountsIQ’s innovative implementation of analysis codes, the attaching of invoices, and the bank reconciliation module. These are things I didn’t have before, and they work beautifully. These features have made the biggest difference to the way I work, giving me the information I need. Of all of these, BI codes are the absolute killer feature that puts AccountsIQ head and shoulders above the competition.
AccountsIQ helps global charity, Lepra gain rapid multi-dimensional reporting and reduce processing time by 80% by moving to the Cloud.
Lepra are a charity leading the global fight for the eradication of Leprosy. Each day over 600 people worldwide are either diagnosed with Leprosy or are starting treatment for Leprosy. More than 8% of these are children.
Based in the UK but supporting operations on a global level, like many charities, Lepra have complex revenue generation. Their revenue comes from various sources and must be consolidated into one system for accounting and compliance purposes. Recognising the need for a cloud solution which can automate their manual processes and consolidate their revenue, the Lepra team engaged ION, a financial transformation specialist, to help find the right solution for them. The support ION offer enables a point of contact for the finance team should any issues arise – whether they are knowledge or training issues, or problems in simple transacting to complex reporting.
Lepra’s current accounting system was not giving them the reporting breakdown that they needed, meaning it was taking too long to pull together information which advised critical business decisions. In addition, the need to manage all their revenue in one place and have access to real-time data would not only save time but also give everyone in the team more access to information.
Like many businesses, Lepra’s current system was not well connected to their CRM system, Advantage, and this meant a lot of manual processing was needed to align the two systems. As with a lot of manual processes, this was time consuming, allowed for human error and often meant the process wasn’t followed exactly as required. Through the discovery phase, their implementation partner, ION, identified a lot of functionality and improvements that Lepra wanted to implement in the future, therefore the need to have a system which could be flexible and grow with the charity was important.
The final major requirement for the team was that the implementation could be quick and seamless. With a lot of disruption to the business already and with many team members working from home, they needed a solution which could be quick and easy to get everyone on board with.
Taking all these things into consideration, AccountsIQ was identified as a good solution for Lepra. A flexible and user-friendly cloud accounting solution, AccountsIQ could address all of their requirements and open up many other benefits.
Nick Avery, Director of Resources, Lepra
“AccountsIQ was the only solution we found that combined the ease of use of cloud based accounting systems and the multi-dimensional analysis that is needed for charity accounting at a cost that we liked!” Nick Avery, Director of Resources, Lepra.
A concern for the team was the time it takes to switch over to a new system and how this would disrupt their processes. However with ION’s quick start implementation framework and our user-friendly interface, the transition was managed with ease. The implementation was completed in a matter of weeks, and the transfer of data to AccountsIQ was seamless.
Like many clients, within weeks, Lepra were finding many benefits to operating within a new system. The ease of use of AccountsIQ has made the adoption across the Lepra team much easier, meaning they can see the benefits of the system straight away. Several key areas have been improved:
