Newport City Council - Case Study
A long-standing and successful partnership sees Newport City Council make significant costs and efficiency savings, using our social care financial management software, Abacus Provider Portal.
Newport City Council has been using Abacus for more than 20 years to automate its social care payment and billing processes.
Abacus Provider Portal has been developed in partnership with local authorities across the UK to ensure it is user-friendly, intuitive, adaptable and secure. The software considerably reduces the time it takes to process and verify invoices, and release payments and reduces costs in all aspects of social care financial management.
Introduction
Since 1997, Newport City Council has been using Abacus, one of our social care finance solutions. Having previously used the traditional method of paper-based forms to collect service user information and carry out financial assessments, the Council has since considerably reduced the time it takes to process and verify invoices and release payments.
Serving the people at Newport
Newport City Council has been utilising the financial assessments, social care payments, service user billing and reporting and workflow of the AbacusProvider Portal to help improve its services for the people of Newport.
Through Abacus Provider Portal, Newport City Council also has access to a portal that creates a secure link to its social care providers. It allows care providers to input the service they have provided and check the status of their payments in real-time.
The Council doesn’t need to print or administer invoices manually, and automated invoice matching and payment suspensions prevent overpayment. Abacus Provider Portal is able to transfer payment files to the local authority’s central payment system to create online paperless payments, which has reduced postage, paper and printing costs.
Abacus Provider Portal is no small back-office software solution. We pay millions of pounds worth of invoices through it. It is a major software system that we couldn’t do without. It is a huge task to move from a paper-based system to an electronic one, so we’ve implemented it gradually, with their ongoing help. We’ve taken it one step at a time, but we are reaping the benefits now.
The COVID-19 pandemic has really highlighted how essential Abacus Provider Portal is for us. We simply would not have been able to carry out our payments while working remotely using a paper-based system.
It is business as usual for us because our teams can access the system from their own homes, and providers can log in as normal.
WCCIS integration
Newport City Council also uses the Welsh Community Care Information System (WCCIS), an electronic information sharing platform designed to deliver improved care and support for people across Wales. Using Abacus Provider Portal information is automatically exported from the Council’s primary social care database, once again saving time and ensuring accurate data entry.
Inspiring Others
Reducing the administrative workload and generating big cost savings,
Abacus Provider Portal is helping Newport City Council to spend less time on completing paperwork and more time commissioning quality care provisions.
The result
- The software removes all manual processes and duplicates data entry, saving time, reducing costs and improving data quality.
- Newport City Council’s financial assessments team can stay fully
informed on payments with real-time online updates. - Teams can process faster, more accurate payments, benefiting both Newport City Council and its service
providers
