Lepra
AccountsIQ helps global charity, Lepra gain rapid multi-dimensional reporting and reduce processing time by 80% by moving to the Cloud.
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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AccountsIQ helps global charity, Lepra gain rapid multi-dimensional reporting and reduce processing time by 80% by moving to the Cloud.
Lepra are a charity leading the global fight for the eradication of Leprosy. Each day over 600 people worldwide are either diagnosed with Leprosy or are starting treatment for Leprosy. More than 8% of these are children.
Based in the UK but supporting operations on a global level, like many charities, Lepra have complex revenue generation. Their revenue comes from various sources and must be consolidated into one system for accounting and compliance purposes. Recognising the need for a cloud solution which can automate their manual processes and consolidate their revenue, the Lepra team engaged ION, a financial transformation specialist, to help find the right solution for them. The support ION offer enables a point of contact for the finance team should any issues arise – whether they are knowledge or training issues, or problems in simple transacting to complex reporting.
Lepra’s current accounting system was not giving them the reporting breakdown that they needed, meaning it was taking too long to pull together information which advised critical business decisions. In addition, the need to manage all their revenue in one place and have access to real-time data would not only save time but also give everyone in the team more access to information.
Like many businesses, Lepra’s current system was not well connected to their CRM system, Advantage, and this meant a lot of manual processing was needed to align the two systems. As with a lot of manual processes, this was time consuming, allowed for human error and often meant the process wasn’t followed exactly as required. Through the discovery phase, their implementation partner, ION, identified a lot of functionality and improvements that Lepra wanted to implement in the future, therefore the need to have a system which could be flexible and grow with the charity was important.
The final major requirement for the team was that the implementation could be quick and seamless. With a lot of disruption to the business already and with many team members working from home, they needed a solution which could be quick and easy to get everyone on board with.
Taking all these things into consideration, AccountsIQ was identified as a good solution for Lepra. A flexible and user-friendly cloud accounting solution, AccountsIQ could address all of their requirements and open up many other benefits.
Nick Avery, Director of Resources, Lepra
“AccountsIQ was the only solution we found that combined the ease of use of cloud based accounting systems and the multi-dimensional analysis that is needed for charity accounting at a cost that we liked!” Nick Avery, Director of Resources, Lepra.
A concern for the team was the time it takes to switch over to a new system and how this would disrupt their processes. However with ION’s quick start implementation framework and our user-friendly interface, the transition was managed with ease. The implementation was completed in a matter of weeks, and the transfer of data to AccountsIQ was seamless.
Like many clients, within weeks, Lepra were finding many benefits to operating within a new system. The ease of use of AccountsIQ has made the adoption across the Lepra team much easier, meaning they can see the benefits of the system straight away. Several key areas have been improved:
After evaluating four charity accounting software products, AccountsIQ was selected for American Chamber of Commerce, because of its clear, simple and intuitive way of working.
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.
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.
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 1st, six months ahead of their expectations.
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.
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.