CPW
CPW (Couch Perry & Wilkes) is a specialist mechanical, electrical and power design consultancy, with more than 380 staff across 13 offices in the UK, plus teams in Poland and India. The business designs and integrates energy solutions for new and existing buildings, with a particular focus on sustainability and energy efficiency, working with clients including colleges, universities and the NHS.
The Challenge
An outdated system holding a growing business back
Before AccountsIQ, CPW relied on Pegasus Opera 3, a dated legacy system that struggled to keep pace with the business's growth across multiple offices and cost centres.
"When I joined the business, we had some legacy systems in place, namely Pegasus Opera 3, and it was used for our main financial management system. It was a very dated system."
The finance team needed a system that supported multi-entity accounting, made it easy to report across numerous cost centres, and could integrate with systems that weren't being replaced, particularly their project management system, Rapport3.
The Solution
A connected finance stack, chosen for its integrations
AccountsIQ stood out for its seamless integration with CPW's existing project management system, while ExpenseIn's integration with their new HR and payroll platform, Iris Cascade, closes the loop even further.
"With ExpenseIn, the integration between ExpenseIn and Iris Cascade, which is our newly installed HR and payroll management system, it sort of closed the loop in integrations. A lot of time that was spent previously manually transferring and importing data from one system to another, that's now handled via various APIs, and therefore the quality of data is more robust."
Implementation was fast, under three months and well supported throughout.
"The implementation processes for both AccountsIQ and ExpenseIn were really well planned out. The support was there both on scheduled calls and outside of those scheduled times as well. The implementation specialists were really knowledgeable about all aspects of the system, and they really did guide and support us through that process."
The Results
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A full audit trail and much richer reporting
Since going live, AccountsIQ has brought a detailed audit trail to purchase orders, approvals and invoices, along with much deeper reporting for senior leadership across CPW's many cost centres.
"With AccountsIQ now, we've got a detailed audit trail for all purchase order requests and approvals, and the same with our purchase ledger invoices... It has been different because it's not something that was in place previously, but it has given us a lot more security in terms of the things that are going through the purchase ledger, which is really important."
- Full audit trail across purchase orders and invoices
- Deeper, cost-centre-level reporting for senior leadership
- Reduced manual data entry and improved data quality
- A finance system built to scale with a growing, multi-office business
Looking ahead
Rolling out ExpenseIn, with sustainability built in
As CPW moves toward a full internal rollout of ExpenseIn, they're looking forward to managing company credit card spend through automated bank feeds, and to ExpenseIn's built-in carbon reporting a valuable feature given sustainability is one of CPW's core specialities.
"We've made the right decision for the business because both of these systems are already demonstrating to us the ability to be able to cope with our ever-changing size and structure, and it can be adapted to ensure that those different reporting requirements are possible."
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