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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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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.
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.
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Humentum, a leading global nonprofit, switched to AccountsIQ as it met their complex accounting and reporting needs and integrations with Salesforce, Stripe, iCompleat and Arlo joined up their data business-wide for increased efficiency and insights.
Humentum, a leading global nonprofit working with humanitarian and development organisations worldwide, has multiple income and funding streams.
“But what I love about AccountsIQ is the simplicity,” says Jocelyn Boughton, Humentum’s Global Director, Finance & Administration. “It’s no more complicated than it needs to be.”
Humentum was formed from a merger of three partners in 2017. They all shared a mission to inspire and achieve operational excellence for organisations focused on positive societal impact. As such, Humentum now delivers training, consultancy, membership, and advocacy for NGOs worldwide.
The three organisations (in the US and UK) were using different versions of QuickBooks when they merged.
“Our main pain-points revolved around reporting and consolidating across GBP and USD,” explains Jocelyn. “We also identified inefficiencies in our manual processes. For example, we had to follow about nine steps when downloading batched invoice transactions from Salesforce to QuickBooks.”
Looking to solve these issues, Humentum instigated an RFP process between four alternative finance systems: Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics and AccountsIQ.
“AccountsIQ ticked all our boxes,” says Jocelyn. “The others ruled themselves out. Sage Intacct was US-based, with no VAT capabilities. With NetSuite, the implementation would be long and complex. Microsoft Dynamics came in at a high price point.”
“AccountsIQ does everything we need and it’s an ideal fit for us as the next step up from QuickBooks. With QuickBooks, month-end could almost take the whole month! Now, we do it within five working days. Getting the results out quickly makes a big difference.”
Humentum needed a finance system that would integrate seamlessly with their other software.
They’ve integrated AccountsIQ with Salesforce, Arlo, Stripe and iCompleat. With Arlo, clients can register for Humentum’s training courses and pay by credit card or request an invoice to pay by bank transfer. The AccountsIQ/Stripe integration means clients can also choose to pay invoices by credit card (a common practice in the US).
The integration between AccountsIQ and iCompleat works well for purchase invoicing. Suppliers send PDF invoices and iCompleat reads and codes the details automatically. All that Humentum’s finance team needs to do is check it and send for approval. The approved invoices are then automatically posted into AccountsIQ.
“It’s much better than manually sending invoices around the company. In fact, the ability to do all these integrations is one of the things I love about AccountsIQ.”
With AccountsIQ’s multi-dimensional reporting structure, Humentum can report on their four main income streams quickly and easily. They can also drill down into the detail. As Jocelyn explains:
“In just two-minutes, I can get reports showing me what’s happening across our different service areas and locations.”
“We now have a clear understanding of exactly what consultancy, training, support, and membership services we’re providing to which organisations and countries. This wasn’t possible with QuickBooks; it would have involved lots of manual work, manipulating transactions and bringing it all together in Excel.”
AccountsIQ’s onboarding team ensured the system was ready for Humentum’s new financial year. “In fact,” says Jocelyn, “it took less than eight weeks to implement AccountsIQ and for our finance team of four users to be up and running on the new system.” Humentum’s Client Engagement Managers are lighter users, but they use AccountsIQ to run GL transaction reports to track their expenses and the time spent on their projects.
“AccountsIQ is intuitive to use. That’s important because mistakes are much less likely to happen when all users can post things quickly and easily.”
Find out more about how you can save time and streamline your finance processes with AccountsIQ’s charity accounting software. Learn more about how our software partners can help deliver additional efficiencies with our Integrated Accounting Software.
