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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.
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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.”
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AccountsIQ delivers a “combination of time saving and financial visibility that allows us to do more data analysis and really add value to our organisation.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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