Accounting for charities and not-for-profits

Alongside their commitment to supporting a better life for everyone affected by epilepsy, national charity Epilepsy Action must contend with some complex financial management challenges. Multiple sources of income, stringent controls over spending and restricted fund requirements, to name a few. That’s before we throw the cost-of-living crisis and an increasingly difficult fundraising environment into the mix.

Undaunted by such challenges, Tony Spinks, Director of Corporate Services with Epilepsy Action, decided to re-assess the systems and processes that would enable the charity to thrive no matter what. His #1 priority was the need to improve management reporting. In particular, he wanted real-time data to make better, quicker decisions about how they allocate resources. 

“We need to be absolutely on top of our financial position. We need complete visibility of what income and expenditure we have coming down the line to make the best decisions for the people who rely on our services. We were using Sage50; it was functional but wasn’t giving us the next level of management reporting we needed.”

Epilepsy Action needed a mid-market accounting solution

With lots of options on the market, choosing a new finance system can be mind boggling. As Tony recognised, Sage 50 is good for start-ups. But Epilepsy Action is a medium-sized organisation with around 70 staff, and they needed the next step up. However, when Tony looked at the Microsoft products and NetSuite, he concluded, “we didn’t need anywhere near that.”

When an invite to an AccountsIQ demo webinar landed in Tony’s in-box, he took 30 minutes out of his day to watch.

“I thought ‘this could be the answer to my problem’. I got in touch and started the journey. The more I saw of the system, the more I was convinced AccountsIQ was what we needed.”

Changing finance system is not as scary as many people think

Epilepsy Action went live with AccountsIQ on 1 January 2023. In the run-up to go-live, Tony and his team structured their training around the AIQ Academy online learning platform. To make it more effective and enjoyable, they introduced a practical, team-based approach to the training.

“The Academy videos are great, but we learn best by doing. We sat down as a team for an hour every Friday to put what we’d learnt into practice. For example, we’d watch the video about how to approve purchase invoices and then go and actually do it. AccountsIQ provide a test environment so it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake, you’re not messing with live data, and you can’t break it.”

Once they’d got to grips with the extra coding functionality that AccountsIQ provides, Tony and his team found the rest of the process of changing finance system easy.

“AccountsIQ is easy to use and our implementation consultant, Helen, was great. Her catchphrase was ‘we’ll just get it done!’ I found the whole process really easy. It’s not as scary as people make out.”

Three months down the line and all the transactional processes are running smoothly. The team are already noticing some significant time saving, particularly around the purchasing processes which used to be very manual. Now, they’re looking at where they can make even more efficiency gains.

“Automating processes is already saving us a huge chunk of time but there’s lots more time saving to come. I’ve got the OData connector working and I’m building the reporting templates. It’s this combination of time saving and financial visibility that will allow us to do more data analysis and really add value to our organisation. Everything I wanted is starting to happen.”

When Dan Garrigan, Finance Director with Merchant Taylors’ Company, decided it was time to upgrade from Sage 200, he knew their new finance system had to be in the Cloud.

"Sage 200 was coming to its end-of-life and the reporting was clunky. If we were going to change finance system we definitely wanted it to be Cloud-based, rather than incurring server costs."

Dan undertook a broad search of the accounting software marketplace. He looked at both large ERP systems, such as NetSuite and Sage Intacct, and smaller out-of-the-box software, such as Xero.

 AccountsIQ ticks all the boxes

"We fell between two stalls. Our finance needs are more complex than the functionality we found in the out-of-the-box systems, like Xero. But it was hard to justify the cost of something like Netsuite."

After joining a couple of AccountsIQ’s webinars and demos, Dan thought: ‘that ticks all the boxes’.

 A painless change   

Dan and his team found switching to AccountsIQ painless. Here’s his advice if you’re thinking of embarking on a similar project:

1) Allow time for pre-implementation work

Dan’s team thought ahead about the design of their Chart of Accounts. They then refined this with the AccountsIQ team who shared their experience of what had worked with other customers. As Dan says:

“The design of your Chart of Accounts is the big thing to get right. Everything else then follows. The time spent on this really paid off for us. We’ve got a design we’re happy with and meets all our needs.”

Watch our ‘How healthy is your Chart of Accounts?’ webinar.

2) Be flexible

The ideas you have at the start of your project might not carry through to implementation. That’s not a problem. As Dan explains:

With AccountsIQ, you get Sandbox test entities. This is great because you can play around with the software before you go-live and see what things look like and how it all works.

3) Invest in team training

Dan strongly recommends training your team, both in the run up to implementation and in the first two months post go-live. As he says:

"AccountsIQ are extremely good at this. We used the AIQ Academy and we had bespoke online training sessions with Daryl. They were all invaluable. We’ve kept the recordings and the team refer back when they need a refresher on features they don’t use regularly."

Find out more about how AccountsIQ can help your finance team

AccountsIQ’s charity accounting software is trusted by over 100 charity and not-for-profit finance teams. You can read their stories here.

To find out more talk to one of our accounting experts.  

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.

Requirements and Challenges

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.

Quick-to-Implement Solution

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.

Outcomes

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:

• Process efficiency: manual processes have been drastically reduced, with some processes now 80% quicker than before.
• CRM data connectivity: the import of data from Lepra’s CRM system, Advantage has been simplified. Removing the need for additional Excel sheets and manual intervention to import and export data sets several times is helping to save the team a lot of time and undoubtedly removing opportunities for error.
• Remote access and usability: the usability of the AccountsIQ system has been praised by the Lepra team and means that the business has more active users getting the most of the system. With many teams still working remotely, having user-friendly cloud systems has minimised training requirements and empowered decision-making across the team.
• Expenses management: switching from paper methods to a digital system, expenses are submitted to the relevant manager directly, with the employee given full traceability to monitor the status of their expense claim.
• Scalability: the integration paves the way for scalability of the system in the future. Built on a solid cloud accounting system, the team can plan for additional modules and reporting functionality when the business requirements dictate.
• Maintenance: often with new software integrations, IT teams are typically concerned about the impact that a project implementation will have on their workload, but with the right system, maintenance for internal teams should be reduced. For Lepra, they have found that the system is much easier to maintain than their previous software.