Case Study: Friends of the Elderly reduced reporting time by up to 75 percent
Access Financials has reduced management reporting time at Friends of the Elderly from two weeks to three days, and improved data reliability.
The challenge
- Manual reporting relying on staff knowledge
- Out of date information
- Rekeying prone to error
- Lack of automation in reconciliation
The approach
- Implemented Access Financials (Dimensions), FocalPoint, Expense, SelectHR and Payroll Results
The results
- Reduced reporting time from two weeks to three days
- Access to accurate and live financial information
- Reduced complexity and the need for re-keying
The success story of Friends of the Elderly
Sharon Nunn talks about Access Financials for Friends of the Elderly and how Access software helped transform finance management.
With a turnover of £22 million and over 900 employees and 200 volunteers, Friends of the Elderly charity provides support for older people affected by loneliness as well as grants for those living on low income. This UK-based charity delivers residential, dementia, nursing and respite care.
Why Friends of the Elderly needed a new financial solution
When Sharon Nunn, Group Financial Controller, started searching for a new financial system, the existing set-up was a manual finance system with most of the reporting done predominantly via Excel spreadsheets. The existing system wasn’t capable of doing either external or internal reporting.
With no procedures in place, there was a real reliance on staff knowing what to do when it came to month-end processing - this was time-consuming and laborious with information often out of date due to the lengthy time it took to compile and collate all the relevant information.
The Charity also needed an expense management system – their previous process was manual and paper-based, meaning that Sharon couldn’t report on what expenses had been paid out or were waiting to be paid. Friends of the Elderly sent out a tender to find the right software and provider.
Sharon understood that it was vital for the provider to be able to scale up and grow with the Charity. ‘The best thing about the Access software is how flexible it is. Not having the software set in stone is key to any growing organisation which has really helped us get what we needed,’
Sharon explained.
Powerful reporting saves the Charity time
Since the implementation of the Access Financials software, Sharon and her team started to notice immediate improvements which included the production of management reports, ‘we can now produce management reports in record time, from compiling all the relevant and correct information to actually completing the report.
This now takes us 3 days for all the different departments within the charity. We wouldn’t have been able to do it this quickly before – it used to take us at least two weeks to complete,’ Sharon pointed out.
Within the Access Financials software, the Charity started using the automated bank reconciliation module and have been able to streamline the way they receive their direct debits from each of their customers. This used to be done manually via a spreadsheet which caused errors and would take hours every day to compile and reconcile and now, it only takes minutes.
Friends of the Elderly also implemented Access Expense to streamline their submission and approval process. Before the introduction of the Expense module, the Charity used a paper expense system which often resulted in lost or misplaced receipts. The Cloud-based Expense module now enables staff to submit claims and managers to approve them anytime and anywhere.
Following the implementation of the Access software, Sharon and her team have been able to free up their time to really understand the financial status of the Charity, allowing them to make more strategic decisions on future-proofing the organisation and ensuring that they could continue to support those who need their help, the elderlies.
