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.

Innovative approach to multi-dimensional reporting killer AccountsIQ feature for Arts charity, Artichoke Trust

Artichoke Trust is a charitable organisation which works with artists to create large-scale public art events across the UK. Artichoke’s ambitious outdoor art projects include the Lumiere light festivals and Antony Gormley’s One & Other Fourth Plinth commission. As a charity managing multiple projects at once, each with varying budgets and funding sources, Artichoke Trust has unique accounting requirements when it comes to project accounting which need to be SORP compliant. In particular, it requires a granular level of detail to ensure accurate recording of core project costs as well as the ability to record project costs against phases.

Neil Goulder, Director of Finance & Operations at Artichoke Trust, had been using Sage Financials as his accounting tool but admits it had a “number of serious shortcomings”. When he learned of Sage’s plan to withdraw the product, it was an opportunity to look around for alternatives which might better fit his particular requirements in Project Accounting and provide the structure he needs for SORP compliance. Neil says,

I started to look for a good Cloud-based replacement that is strong on dimensional reporting and analysis codes. Among a dozen candidates was AccountsIQ. I took a peek at a demo system and really liked it. Great, scalable product, with an innovative approach to multi-dimensional coding.

‘Conditional’ dimensions for accurate posting

Strong dimensional analysis is key for Neil. AccountsIQ allows for up to six customisable dimensions linked to a unique BI code, plus an infinite number of codes that can be assigned to each dimension. Reporting is possible across all dimensions and codes. AccountsIQ’s key strength is that only valid permutations of Analysis Codes can be used when data is input, which significantly reduces the risk of human error when it comes to tracking costs. Neil explains,

Dimensions are really important to us. We looked at Sage 50, but that only had two dimensions. We needed at least four, covering cost centres; projects; project phases; and individual light installations. There are some very expensive systems which can do it but there aren’t many affordable systems which offer this level of flexibility. That was an absolute ‘must’ from our point of view. AccountsIQ is the only product I’ve seen that allows you to create these ‘conditional’ dimensions.

Greater efficiency through automation and streamlined workflow

AccountsIQ features an automated bank reconciliation functionality that has helped Neil speed up the period end reconciliation process.

I really like the way the Bank Rec module works. The system with Sage Financials was so overcomplicated we never used it and worked in spreadsheets instead. AccountsIQ is very straightforward. I like the way it recognises past transactions and fills in as much of the information as it can, which really speeds up the process.

Neil is able to upload paperwork against transactions which makes it much easier to provide information to auditors and also facilitate a mostly paperless environment. Ultimately, AccountsIQ enables Neil to keep all of his data in one place, largely automated, without the need for other spreadsheets or manual processes.

With smart use of the dimensions coding structure, I can get every piece of information needed into AccountsIQ so that I don’t have to maintain control accounts manually in Excel. It saves us a huge amount of time.

Ease of access to data for SORP reporting

AccountsIQ’s Excel Add-in offers further efficiencies for Neil, allowing him to use a real-time data link from AccountsIQ to create tables in Excel which are fed into the SORP compliant statutory accounts prepared in Word. This means updates are refreshed instantly as changes are made to Statutory accounts.

AccountsIQ is brilliant at accommodating the structure needed for the SORP. We pull the information into our format live from AccountsIQ through Excel. It’s an incredibly quick and efficient process.

Lightning-fast implementation

Having initially set an ambitious release target of two weeks, Neil was able to implement AccountsIQ at Artichoke Trust in a record-breaking two days. This was in large part due to Neil’s own tenacity in getting to grips with the BI codes and how they could best be mapped to his needs. AccountsIQ’s development team gave Neil access to a test system so he could model the BI codes before going live. He had also exported and cleaned the static data from his old accounting system such as customer information, bank account details, and the nominal ledger structure. This level of preparation allowed Neil to go live with AccountsIQ so quickly. He says,

I hoped we might break all records and implement it in a fortnight as our new accounting year started on the First of April. I signed a contract Wednesday morning and we went live at 4:30 the next day.

Summing up his experience

The elements that have really made a difference are AccountsIQ’s innovative implementation of analysis codes, the attaching of invoices, and the bank reconciliation module. These are things I didn’t have before, and they work beautifully. These features have made the biggest difference to the way I work, giving me the information I need. Of all of these, BI codes are the absolute killer feature that puts AccountsIQ head and shoulders above the competition.