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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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What advice would an historic City of London Livery Company give to finance teams looking to implement new accounting software? The best: it’s all about planning ahead and design thinking.
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.
"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’.
Dan and his team found switching to AccountsIQ painless. Here’s his advice if you’re thinking of embarking on a similar project:
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.
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.
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."
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.
Find out how AccountsIQ is helping WCVA with everything from trustee reports to SORP reporting.
“The more we use AccountsIQ, the more we realise how much it can do.”
WCVA is the national membership body for voluntary organisations in Wales. It manages funding, training and a range of support services that help charities and non-profits ‘make a bigger difference together’. In the months before the UK’s first lockdown, WCVA’s Finance Director, Tracey Marsh, recognised that they needed better financial reporting and started looking at new finance systems.
Tracey Marsh, Finance Director, WCVA
“We weren’t happy with the reporting capabilities in our existing system, Exchequer,” says Tracey. “Every time we wanted a report that wasn’t standard, such as comparing actuals to budget with variances, we had to pay extra. That was on top of an already high annual fee.”
When lockdown happened, this sense of dissatisfaction turned into more urgent and serious issues. As with many other organisations, the transition to home working accelerated the need for digital transformation.
“Our old system was server-based rather than Cloud-based,” explains Tracey.
“It was clunky; dropping all the time. And it just got worse and worse. In that first lockdown, most of the pain from a finance point of view was because of the system. It meant we were working twice as many hours to do the same amount of work as when we were in the office. We simply couldn’t continue like that.”
The WCVA team first heard about AccountsIQ from their Scottish counterparts, the SCVO (Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations). They were already using AccountsIQ and were happy to vouch for the system’s benefits. Nonetheless, WCVA still did their due diligence and conducted a thorough analysis of AccountsIQ against Sage, Iplicit and Exchequer.
“We chose AccountsIQ partly because of cost,” admits Tracey. “It came in at a reasonable price and we liked that there’s flexibility in the pricing. With so much uncertainty, we didn’t want to commit to a fixed cost that wasn’t linked to the number of users.”
WCVA were also keen to move away from old, manual ways of working to more automated, seamless processes.
“This is something I love about AccountsIQ,” says Tracey. “Everything is self- contained within the system; even our bank reconciliations are now automated. You’re also able to attach documents to transactions; our auditors think this is wonderful.”
One of Tracey’s key objectives was for budget holders to have access to certain parts of the system, so they’d be more self-sufficient. WCVA has around 40 system users. Five are finance team members and the others are set up as light users which enables the wider business to manage approvals and access reports.
The next step will be to start using AccountsIQ’s automated consolidation features. WCVA has two subsidiaries. One has already moved onto AccountsIQ from Xero and the other will follow in due course.
Like many non-profits, WCVA uses AccountsIQ’s BI codes and multi-dimensional reporting to manage their complex accounting and reporting needs.
“One of our dimensions is used to distinguish between restricted and unrestricted funds,” explains Tracey. “Then we have lots of projects to which we allocate salaries and other costs; that’s another list of dimensions.
We’ve also created other dimensions so we can deliver detailed reports to our trustees that show exactly what each project is contributing to the organisation. Once we've closed the accounts, I can just run this multiple KPI report for the trustees. I used to have to do that manually and now AccountsIQ pretty much does it all for me, it’s brilliant.”
WCVA’s finance team created their Chart of Accounts in AccountsIQ to align with their SORP reporting.
“Now, we just run the GL explorer and there's the statutory accounts. Of course, we still have to do the notes ourselves, but the balance sheet is all there. It’s phenomenal!”
When asked to sum up the single best thing about AccountsIQ, Tracey responds:
“As soon as we had the demo with Ellen at AccountsIQ, I could see it was a user-friendly system with a logical, intuitive layout. It was just lovely to look at.
Also, Ellen was so knowledgeable and helpful, I knew we’d work well together. In fact, we’ve found that the more we use AccountsIQ, the more we learn and realise just how much more it can do for us.”
AccountsIQ solves the often complex accounting, productivity and reporting challenges of over 100 charities such as the Archdiocese of Dublin and Lepra. View our customer testimonials.
Find out more about our charity accounting software.
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
