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 1st, 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.
Learn more about AccountsIQ affordable accounting software for charities and not-for-profits.
Download our Cloud Accounting for Charities guide helping you overcome the challenge of SORP reporting.
Download the independent review of AccountsIQ and its suitability for charities by John Tate, previously special adviser to the Charity Finance Group.