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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.”
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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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.”
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.”
