Accounting for charities and not-for-profits

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.

The challenge

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.

The solution

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 1^st, six months ahead of their expectations.

Key benefits

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.

AccountsIQ provides a flexible and easy to use accounting infrastructure that easily adapts to the needs of this rapidly growing business

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.

Efficiency through adaptability and integration

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 as priority

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.”

Building for growth

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 provides Humentum with a simple solution to complex accounting needs

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.”

Month-end results are much quicker with AccountsIQ

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.”

Integrations were an important part of the decision

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.”

Multi-dimensional reporting gives clear insights

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.”

The system was quick to set up and is intuitive to use

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.”

Learn more

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.