Thames River Capital

Formed in 1998, Thames River manages in excess of $8 billion. In addition to segregated accounts, the company offers professional investors both traditional and alternative strategy investment through a variety of single and multi-manager funds.

The story

During the formation of the company in 1998, Thames River Capital purchased the Access Horizons core finance system due to its rich, easy to use functionality. Thames River was attracted by the ability within Access Horizons to streamline business-wide activity whilst maintaining strong management of the finances.

Industry	Financial Services
Geographic	London
Employees	165
Solution	Dimensions
Modules	Core ledgers Multi-currency Costing/project management

As the company grew, Thames River decided to up-grade their system to Access Dimensions Lite. Following advice from Access, Thames River selected the Microsoft SQL Server based solution, designed specifically for medium-sized companies. Offering the UK's most cost- effective entry point into Client/Server accounting technology, Dimensions Lite offers over 35 fully integrated multi- currency modules which could be configured to Thames River's precise business needs.

The solution

For Thames River, Dimensions Lite is an engine that powers productivity. It has streamlined the multiple day to day activities across the entire business, and continues to grow at a fast pace.

Previously, management reports consisted of a series of inter-linked Excel spreadsheets. Monthly figures had to be manually extracted from the accounts system into these spreadsheets and then re-formatted. Budgetary figures were pulled in from yet more spreadsheets, all of which represented an onerous monthly task.

"Access has been the foundation of our finance team for many years and has worked with us to develop the reporting needed to meet our stakeholders' requirements." Adrian Johnson
Financial Controller

Now, macro-driven spreadsheets extract live financial data from the core finance system, making use of the open database architecture provided by Microsoft SQL Server, seamlessly consolidating information from multiple companies and databases. The task is now completed in a significantly quicker time and with greater accuracy, enabling tangible cost savings.

The new Access business solution enables Thames River to have 12-monthly rolling profit and loss reports and balance sheet information. The accounts information is taken to a further level of analysis with summaries and/or detailed P&L information available, for both period to date and year to date.

Agent rebates, calculated in a Microsoft Access database developed in-house, were previously entered as summarised nominal ledger journals. These figures are now effortlessly imported each month as individual accrual invoices, and ultimately as rebate payments, directly into the purchase ledger against each agent's account. Not only does this save time, but it also provides a wealth of information within the core finance system that was previously unavailable, as well as facilitating bank reconciliations and payments.

Technologies in use

Access Dimensions Lite provides Thames River with a Microsoft SQL Server (industry standard) database. Thames River has taken advantage of all the benefits offered by Access' solution, including enhanced functionality and the resilience built into the Microsoft SQL server. This has allowed them to adopt a recognised, industry standard database structure, thus standardising their future IT strategies.

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Selecting business software for financial organisations

Designed with the needs of stockbrokers, analysts, traders and fund managers in mind, this handy guide breaks down the key areas of software selection into four easy-to-follow stages. From researching vendors to choosing a software partner, it also provides information about adding functionality.
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