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We needed to move to a cloud-based accounting solution that could meet the needs of our group of publishing and media businesses. We were looking for a high level of core functionality instead of bespoke patching and a system readily capable of scaling-up. AccountsIQ is an established product and it became obvious to us the product would continue to evolve.
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The Irish Times group moved away from multi-location, on-premise systems and selected AccountsIQ to get advanced multi-dimensional reporting, and automated consolidation, giving the team greater insights and significantly reducing month-end close time.
When The Irish Times Group acquired The Examiner Group in 2018, the enlarged group comprised a significant number of distinct business units. With a vision of creating a more modern workplace while reducing costs, the company wanted to move away from on-premise, multi-location systems and selected cloud financial management software AccountsIQ. Group CFO, Mikie Sheehan describes how time and resources have been recovered by simplifying processes and reporting.
One of the benefits of bringing a group together is to drive synergies in the cost base as we re-engineer how we operate day-to-day. Systems automation is the real prize and AccountsIQ is enabling us to realise these operational goals,” says Mikie Sheehan.
Reflecting on the benefits of replacing legacy systems, Mikie says, “The savings with AccountsIQ are twofold. Firstly, we are saving costs but we also have ongoing savings through the streamlining of our processes.”
Describing how the simplicity of the system provides him with greater control and saves precious time, Mikie adds,
It’s intuitive enough that it’s easy for me to run a report or get a quick snapshot on performance at any stage throughout the month. Personally, I have more visibility, I can ask more questions, I can drill down into the detail and it’s simple to do all this in AccountsIQ. It has made a real change to our reporting processes. The consolidation functionality is also a huge asset within the system and significantly reduces month-end close to allow us to get that Group view immediately”
With an estimated 12,000 invoices being processed a year, automating this process first seemed an obvious way to achieve real, measurable efficiency in a short space of time.
Summarising how AccountsIQ ticked many of the system requirements, Mikie adds,
The automation within AccountsIQ when it comes to things like Bank Reconciliation is really slick, and its ability to integrate document scanning and storage gives us end-to-end automation and a paperless Accounts Payable process. It has dramatically changed the way we work.”
Due to AccountsIQ’s existing integration with advanced document scanning software Kefron AP, the Accounts Payable element was created quickly, and means they now have paperless approval of invoices. “In the current environment, where the team has been working remotely over the past 15 months, the ability to capture, analyse, distribute for approval, review and pay suppliers with all the information gathered in the one place has been a significant capacity driver for the finance team.”
The business relies heavily on sales data gathered in their advertising booking system, provided by another vendor, which is intertwined with their finance and reporting mechanisms. Back-office integration with both systems was an essential part of the vision of a more efficient future.
AccountsIQ’s integration with the ad booking system includes functionality that generates all weekly invoicing and manages adjustments. It also makes an up-to-the-minute credit status of every account visible to the sales team and automates a rules-based process for issuing dunning letters. With different letters designed to be released at different times, it removes the admin-heavy and error-prone end of the process, vitally supporting cash flow.
Much of the success of the project comes from a partnership approach to designing and implementing the system and building a feasible roadmap together with the other software suppliers involved. In total there were four main systems and six others that needed to be integrated with AccountsIQ. AccountsIQ’s open API has made this task a lot easier.
With AccountsIQ, we get a real sense of proactiveness and solving problems together. No system that you buy off the shelf is going to be an exact fit. AccountsIQ worked with us to find ways of marginally reconfiguring the system to meet our requirements,” says Mikie.
“AccountsIQ’s implementation support is very pro-active in its response times. We have had a consistent team supporting us throughout, they are nimble and solution-oriented in their approach and work hard to understand our business, which has a degree of complexity the team may not have come across elsewhere. It is way more than “Software-as-a-Service”, and the pace the AccountsIQ team worked at to get it up and running was superb,” adds Mikie.
I am excited to see how the Partnership will develop with a timetable for future development, which we have been involved in at every stage. The whole team are encouraged at how their feedback is taken on board in this development roadmap and the expenses app, as well as the banking integration technology. These are just two of the releases that we are working with AccountsIQ on,” explains Mikie.
AccountsIQ’s COO Darren Cran adds, “We are delighted to have helped with this digital finance transformation project at The Irish Times, and adding enhancements requested by Mikie and his team, which will benefit our whole user base. A key factor in the success was the Finance team’s willingness to adopt the way AccountsIQ solves key finance pain points. It’s always refreshing for our customer success team when customers have this growth mindset.”
Darren adds, “Remote working has been a key shift of the last 12 months and AccountsIQ, being cloud-based, has enabled this transition for finance teams. Work/life balance is now foremost in everyone’s minds and cloud technology has made it straightforward for organisations to offer this flexibility. Most of our customers are experiencing an increase in focus and productivity as a result.”
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New Statesman Media Group gain greater control over their finance function thanks to AccountsIQ's in-built automations and integrations with Salesforce and Chaser.
The New Statesman Media Group (NS Media) has grown substantially since its launch in 1913 and as with all businesses in the publishing industry, they have had to adapt to survive in the digital era. NS Media has been on a mission to migrate all of its business systems to digital, including their accounting system, where Mark Moore, the group’s Finance Director, led the way to replace the outdated SunSystems accounting platform. Having compared several mid-market Cloud-based accounting software vendors, including Xero and iPlicit, Mark chose AccountsIQ for its full in-built feature set without the need for bespoking, as well as his confidence that the product would continually evolve and support this dynamic and constantly changing group.
Mark Moore, Finance Director, New Statesman Media Group:
We needed to move to a cloud-based accounting solution that could meet the needs of our group of publishing and media businesses. We were looking for a high level of core functionality instead of bespoke patching and a system readily capable of scaling-up. AccountsIQ is an established product and it became obvious to us the product would continue to evolve. Lastly, the pricing was very competitive, and the accreditation by the ICAEW was important to us.” – Mark Moore, Finance Director, NS Media Group."
NS Media’s complexity comes from the wide range of income streams and diverse businesses across the group’s 17 entities. With consolidation and multi-dimensional analysis built into AccountsIQ, it’s easy for Mark to extract the reports with as much complexity as he needs, including reporting by sector, product, distribution channel, brand and department. AccountsIQ supports up to six customisable dimensions linked to a unique BI code, plus an unlimited number of codes that can be assigned to each dimension. Mark is able to report across all dimensions and codes, and can also create bespoke reports with AccountsIQ’s Excel Add-in.
We’ve always had a complex structure and the great thing with AccountsIQ is that it can accommodate as much complexity as you want. We use BI codes and all of the dimensions because we need that level of complexity to cut across the information,” said Mark.
Group VAT reporting in line with Making Tax Digital has also been a boon to Mark’s finance function, bringing greater assurance when it comes to compliance.
Sun was terrible for VAT and we needed bridging software to do our VAT returns. With AccountsIQ we have one system that does everything,” said Mark. “It’s already integrated with HMRC which made it easy to adapt to Making Tax Digital. For compliance, it’s much better and gives us confidence in protecting the business for the long term.”
Mark is benefiting from two AccountsIQ integrations that are helping him streamline his accounts receivable process:
AccountsIQ’s existing partnership with these Cloud-based apps made integration easy, despite NS Media having a complex Salesforce setup with numerous customisations. Integration support from AccountsIQ and good project management from Marks’ team combined for a relatively smooth integration. The finance team now has greater control over the accounts receivable process from start to finish.
When we invoice from Salesforce, ten minutes later it’s in AccountsIQ and we can start the collection process,” said Mark. “All of the data in our accounts receivable link up to Chaser which has automatic routines sending proactive emails to our clients to help us collect the invoice. We’re getting our invoices paid more quickly and saving a lot of time on accounts receivable tasks.”
AccountsIQ’s cloud accounting features and integrated accounting software are designed to automate as much of the accounting process as possible. Built-in automations include accounts payable, bank feeds, invoicing, expense capture, consolidation, workflow approval, and BI. By using these automations, Mark is gaining greater efficiencies in the long term that make his finance team more cost effective.
Everything is much simpler now with an accounting process that is more process-led rather than ad hoc,” said Mark. “For example, expenses and fixed assets are all automated whereas before, it took me about a week to balance everything in a spreadsheet. Things are much more efficient and we have more time to do things that provide more added value to the business. A lot of tasks like VAT used to be laborious, manual processes. Now they can be done in 5-10 minutes. That’s helping us get the best use of our existing resources and allowing us to be a leaner finance team.”
With all of the data stored on the Cloud, instantly accessible, and most importantly, accurate thanks to AccountsIQ’s automations and integrations, Mark has more control over his finance function than he’s ever had before. Mark highlights several areas where these controls are particularly beneficial to the business:
As an enterprise it’s much better to have a finance system that integrates with the business,” said Mark. “Features like workflow approval give a lot of control back to the finance team, and effectively we’re able to evolve. Now as accountants we’re not just people who process transactions; we have the ability to do more, contribute to strategy objectives and the overall value of the business.”
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Tindle Newspaper Group switches from Sage to AccountsIQ for multi-dimensional, streamlined and consolidated reporting.
Alastair Manson, Group Finance Director, Tindle
When Group Finance Director Alastair Manson joined Tindle, his immediate mission was to streamline the group, centralise processes and move the finance function away from Sage Line 50 and onto the Cloud. He quickly set about merging some 36 trading entities to become 7, and moved from locally-hosted database infrastructure, choosing AccountsIQ’s Cloud-based accounting and consolidation platform over Sage’s Cloud offering.
It was clear the Sage Line 50 platform wasn’t right for us and Sage’s Cloud option didn’t give us the necessary step up, neither did it have the level of controls that we needed around processes. AccountsIQ gives us a more sophisticated platform and automated consolidation. The process for accessing business information has changed beyond all recognition with AccountsIQ.”
Having appointed accounting advisor and AccountsIQ implementation partner flinder, the project quickly began to take shape. flinder worked with Alastair through a number of workshops to determine the best reporting structure and to rationalise the group structure. The project also included automating processes, refining reporting, and integrating the new system with other business-critical software.
Like most local newspapers, Tindle relies heavily on the support of its advertisers to continue to bring local news (on and offline, and by radio) to communities in some of the more remote parts of the UK. The ad booking system the group uses is a bespoke piece of software which is not in the Cloud. The flinder team worked closely with AccountsIQ to ensure that a two-way data exchange could be achieved with the in-house developed system.
Additionally, iCompleat is used by the business to scan and digitise invoice processing. Alastair explains, “Because AccountsIQ integrates with iCompleat, we can drill-down to a copy of the invoice attached to each transaction, which is fantastic. Previously, we had to go into another system to look up an invoice, so it saves a huge amount of time and removes a tedious aspect of the job.”
Prior to the system change, Tindle’s management accounting team would obtain Sage data from over 30 local databases and try to consolidate the reports. The disparity across the various book-keeping methods created inefficiencies which had to be remedied with standardisation.
Bookkeeping was done in different ways, at different times and to varying degrees of complexity across the businesses. Sage databases would be submitted from the local publishing centres and we would then have to do the reconciliation, prepayments and accruals, then send back the adjustments. All of this was risky in terms of version control. The reporting was inevitably inaccurate and late. Now, AccountsIQ allows us to report monthly management accounts within two weeks.”
The level of user controls in Sage was another issue which created inconsistencies in the information. When using Sage, Alastair was unable to close the accounting period each month. Additionally, due to low level user controls, local users could overwrite information and cancel historic transactions, throwing the data out of line. With AccountsIQ it is easy to establish and enforce controls with full user profiling and audit trail by user.
Alastair adds, “Now that we have a baseline process for reporting, getting further commercial insights will be really useful.” Next steps for reporting include being able to drill down to obtain separate P&Ls for each region, and even further to look at each publishing centre within each region.
Tindle’s publications are weekly, so reporting by week is more meaningful against weekly budgets. The business applies the 4–4–5 calendar accounting method which flinder was able to configure within AccountsIQ. (The method divides a year into four quarters of 13 weeks, grouped into two 4-week ‘months’ and one 5-week month.) Alastair says, “The 4-4-5 accounting method wasn’t achievable with Sage because it runs on calendar months. We always reported in 4-4-5 but that meant we had to shift invoices around in the background which left the process exposed to human error. The implementation team at flinder helped us scope this process when we were designing the system and it performs very well.”
The new platform was implemented and operational prior to COVID-19 lockdown in the UK meaning that the system could facilitate remote-working and the business could continue to operate.
We were lucky to have completed our move to AccountsIQ before COVID-19 and it has meant we can continue operating with minimal disruption. With AccountsIQ and with the expert support from flinder, our controls are better, the information is far richer, the system is more robust and reporting is timely. It gives us better information on which to make decisions. By reconfiguring our operation and moving platform, we will likely save between three and four hundred thousand pounds per year.”
