Accounting for charities and not-for-profits

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.

Requirements and Challenges

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.

Quick-to-Implement Solution

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.

Outcomes

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:

• Process efficiency: manual processes have been drastically reduced, with some processes now 80% quicker than before.
• CRM data connectivity: the import of data from Lepra’s CRM system, Advantage has been simplified. Removing the need for additional Excel sheets and manual intervention to import and export data sets several times is helping to save the team a lot of time and undoubtedly removing opportunities for error.
• Remote access and usability: the usability of the AccountsIQ system has been praised by the Lepra team and means that the business has more active users getting the most of the system. With many teams still working remotely, having user-friendly cloud systems has minimised training requirements and empowered decision-making across the team.
• Expenses management: switching from paper methods to a digital system, expenses are submitted to the relevant manager directly, with the employee given full traceability to monitor the status of their expense claim.
• Scalability: the integration paves the way for scalability of the system in the future. Built on a solid cloud accounting system, the team can plan for additional modules and reporting functionality when the business requirements dictate.
• Maintenance: often with new software integrations, IT teams are typically concerned about the impact that a project implementation will have on their workload, but with the right system, maintenance for internal teams should be reduced. For Lepra, they have found that the system is much easier to maintain than their previous software.

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 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.”

Lockdown accelerated the need for change

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.”

AccountsIQ came in at a good price

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.”

Finance processes are now automated and seamless  

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.”

Budget holders have more autonomy

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.

Multi-dimensional reporting is so much easier

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.”

AccountsIQ also helps with SORP reporting

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!”

AccountsIQ is so easy to use, WCVA are using it more and more

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.”

Learn More

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.