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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.
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Sarah Kilmartin, COO with The Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton, outlines the benefits – and challenges – of digital finance transformation. She also explains why she would never go back to the old ways of working with stand-alone, desktop systems and is happy to recommend AccountsIQ.
In 2018, The Diocese of Arundel and Brighton began a digital finance transformation initiative with AccountsIQ. It was a highly ambitious project involving complex workflow automations. There were also multiple stakeholders, including around 70, mainly volunteer, users with varying levels of accounting and IT experience.
The Diocese had been using a stand-alone finance system, called Finance Co-ordinator. “It had a good Chart of Accounts,” Sarah recalls. “But no consolidation function. At the end of the year, each parish would send in their activity and finance would re-key the transactions.”
These manual processes were time consuming and error prone. More importantly, the only management information the Diocese had was a P&L and balance sheet for each parish. “There was no granularity,” says Sarah, “the old system didn’t give us the insight we needed at individual parish level.”
In search of a more advanced cloud system, Sarah talked to AccountsIQ’s CEO, Tony Connolly, and the finance team from the Archdiocese of Dublin, who were already an AccountsIQ customer.
“AccountsIQ is Cloud-based, so I can access the parish books and see what’s going on from the centre.”
Sarah Kilmartin, COO, The Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton.
The Diocese of Arundel and Brighton chose AccountsIQ because they wanted to be able to share a single platform with their parishes. Their objective was to automate as much of their manual finance processing as possible.
Digital cash collection is an example of an effective process that AccountsIQ created specifically for the Diocese. Income from each church is entered on an online cash collection sheet, which updates directly into AccountsIQ. This means income is recognised directly on entry and can be consolidated across all parishes. Crucially, Sarah’s team didn’t simply replicate their previous, paper-based cash collection process into AccountsIQ.
“We combined a number of processes,” explains Sarah. “Now, it’s quick, easy, and error proof with no re-keying, sending emails or putting things in the post. I also look after a small parish as a volunteer and the monthly bank rec takes less than 15 minutes.
Sarah also likes the useability of AccountsIQ, “The most useful feature for me as COO is having all my parishes laid out in a list. I can click down to the transaction level detail very easily. I also have full trust in the completeness and accuracy of the data being captured; it accounts for every penny that goes through the bank.”
The Diocese is using AccountsIQ extensively for analysis and reporting. Each parish has its own database in AccountsIQ, and the BI coding structure enables the Diocese to run reports for each church, fund, site or central office department.
“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.
“I find the management reports useful and look at them all the time. For example, when a new priest comes to a parish I can run through the P&L very easily. Previously, we didn’t have this level of information.”
After several years on the platform, AccountsIQ continues to work well for the Diocese. Sarah reports that they hit their year-end deadlines, with all parish accounts reconciled within two months. “Initially, we needed support to roll out the project,” she recalls. “But our users are now confident using the system.”
Looking back, Sarah describes this complex digital transformation project as a creative, on-going collaboration between the Diocese and the AccountsIQ team. “There are still things we plan to do,” she says. “For example, contactless payments have become mainstream since we started with AccountsIQ, and we need to find a solution that works for us. That said, whenever we bring problems to AccountsIQ, they understand them and help us sort them.”
“AccountsIQ is a product I would happily recommend to others. It has revolutionised how we do our job.”
Sarah Kilmartin, COO, The Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton
Summing-up, Sarah concludes that, now they have everyone working on one central Cloud accounting platform, they would never go back.
“We have fewer finance staff now, but they are more skilled. Our people costs may not have gone down, but the quality of what we know has gone up. We would certainly never go back to having 80+ desktop systems. Ultimately, AccountsIQ is a product I would happily recommend to others.”
Discover how AccountsIQ's accounting software for charities solves the often complex accounting challenges of over 100 not for profits such as Humentum.
Call us on +44 (0)203 598 7350 or email us to set up a free consultation/demo.
AccountsIQ’s ease of adoption and time-saving benefits enable Whale and Dolphin Conservation to weather a perfect storm
Wildlife charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) inspires global actions to achieve its vision of a world where every whale and dolphin is safe and free. A combination of campaigns, research, education, and other conservation activities underpin WDC’s strategy to achieve its goal. With Headquarters in the UK and offices around the globe, WDC is funded through voluntary donations and grants by individuals, trusts, corporate partners and other stakeholders who share WDC’s commitment to the protection of whales and dolphins.
In early 2020 WDC’s Finance Director Jane Bryan ran into ‘a perfect storm’ of challenges for her department:
We had a tortuous experience with Sage. My first task was to find a new accounting system. We had a ticking clock. The need was very clear: we need it in, we need it working, and we need it quick.” – Yvonne Hanks
After narrowing down a long list of potential accounting platforms to a shortlist of five, AccountsIQ became the obvious choice for its charity-compliant feature set and great customer support at a price they could afford.
With other vendors I was handed over to sales people who didn’t really understand our needs. With AccountsIQ it was reassuring to speak to people who understood things from an accountant’s perspective. 99% of what we needed we felt AccountsIQ could offer.” – Yvonne Hanks
WDC implemented AccountsIQ for its two UK entities: the UK charity as parent and its UK trading company as subsidiary. Jane and Yvonne worked alongside AccountsIQ’s support team to set up the software so that it was charity compliant from the start:
When we set up AccountsIQ, I felt like we set it up properly. What we’ve done, it works. We’ve done the VAT returns. We’ve done internal reporting. And I’m confident we’ll be able to do external reporting for the SORP.” – Jane Bryan
Jane and Yvonne have both experienced time-saving benefits from the numerous automations and paper-saving processes in AccountsIQ:
I love the GL explorer – it’s a huge time saver. With the VAT return we used to download huge amounts of information and manipulate the data to find out our partial recovery rate. With the GL explorer, the information is already there for business and non-business income. We can tell our percentage at any point in time rather than at the end of every quarter which means the information is so much more accurate than it otherwise would have been.” – Jane Bryan
Jane and Yvonne credit AccountsIQ’s user-friendly features and substantial help resources with helping them get up to speed quickly with the platform. This includes:
These features make it easy to train new users, even when staff are working entirely from home.
We’ve always had people working from home, but where I’m really confident is with our new hires. Training can be very time-consuming but, with AccountsIQ, I’m confident that with a little bit of help they’ll be able to learn the tool largely on their own. The help documents and AIQ Academy e-learning platform mean our new hires can answer most of their questions themselves. This is better for them and better for us.” – Jane Bryan
People previously had to have a comprehensive knowledge of the organisation before putting invoices in the system. The way AccountsIQ is structured, because you can set up defaults for any supplier, and default BI codes by general ledger codes, you can have a fairly inexperienced user come in and quickly learn the system.” – Yvonne Hanks
We chose AccountsIQ for its easy implementation, excellent help notes, competitive price, and honest support. They seemed very experienced in migration from Sage Financials, very responsive, and I was able to have an ongoing relationship with the same people. Compared to other suppliers, it didn’t feel like people were selling the moon and not delivering. AccountsIQ has set us up to do internal and external reporting and VAT returns more quickly and more accurately than ever before.” – Jane Bryan
AccountsIQ provides a flexible and easy to use accounting infrastructure that easily adapts to the needs of this rapidly growing business Epic.
When EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, part of the CHQ group, first opened in May 2016, its founder Neville Isdell had a vision to create a “local museum that could connect with people globally”. Since then, the museum’s innovative use of digital displays and interactive galleries has fostered year on year increases in visitors from both Ireland and overseas. In 2019, EPIC was voted Europe’s Leading Tourist Attraction at the World Travel Awards, further cementing the museum’s growth potential.
EPIC required a flexible accounting system that could easily evolve and adapt to the needs of a growing museum and EPIC’s Head of Finance, Aoife Smith, relies on AccountsIQ’s financial management software to provide this foundation for growth.
EPIC is part of the CHQ group, who use AccountsIQ for consolidation. EPIC has three legal entities using AccountsIQ: the asset company, the museum, and the retail store. The company’s main sources of revenue are from ticketing and sales in the gift store, where EPIC uses Access Gamma’s visitor management software for ticketing and retail purchases. AccountsIQ integrates with Access Gamma, which effectively shortcuts much of the manual data entry work, that would otherwise be required, by creating automated reports via the integration.
Aoife also makes use of AccountsIQ’s Purchase Order processing module for further efficiencies. She says,
Prior to AccountsIQ, purchase orders were cumbersome involving emails and handwritten requests. With the PO module we’ve been able to automate all of this, removing overheads, and even tailoring invoices for specific customers. It’s user-friendly and we’re very happy with it.”
Innovation has been key to EPIC’s success since its opening. As a 100% digital museum, it must demonstrate technological savviness through both its public displays as well as through its own back-end infrastructure. With AccountsIQ, EPIC can leverage Cloud-based technologies to streamline its processes through automation, anywhere access, and integration with existing systems. All of this combines to increase efficiency so that resources can be spent on facilitating growth. Aoife says,
AccountsIQ has really helped us maximise efficiencies by being so user-friendly and versatile, with some really useful tools. I especially like that we can adapt much of the system ourselves, which is work that previously required the input of an accounts support team to complete. My favourite tool is the GL Explorer, which allows us to review both live and retrospective P&L and balance sheets instantly, as well as drill down to a transactional level. Also, the automated bank reconciliation is very efficient.”
One of the key benefits of AccountsIQ's charity accounting software is the ability to scale easily as EPIC grows. Aoife Smith anticipates that consolidation will soon be on the agenda:
Having had such great results from AccountsIQ’s core features, we are now looking forward to utilising the consolidation module which will help us go further in laying the foundation for our growing museum, and will enable us to provide quarterly consolidated accounts to the Board across the two main entities. We also have three other entities currently using a different accounts package, which we plan to migrate to AccountsIQ before the end of the year.”
Aoife sums up AccountsIQ’s role in laying the foundation for the future:
To grow the museum we need an infrastructure that is flexible and easy to use. We are still growing and will hopefully continue to grow over the next few years. We are confident that AccountsIQ can fulfil our needs as our company grows. It is working really well for us and we don’t anticipate any issues in the future.”
