Age Scotland’s move to iplicit was justified ‘within a couple of months’ after big time savings

“Our reporting wasn’t as user friendly and timely as we needed to empower budget holders. It was a bit reliable for remote working, and the audit trails and internal controls were not as good as we really needed.” 

Ben Thomas
Interim Director of Finance at Age Scotland

The solution

Ben hadn’t heard of iplicit before he first looked at it – but he quickly found it was suited to the challenges facing the charity. 

“Systems such as Xero and QuickBooks are excellent for organisations up to a certain size, but would probably struggle with the number of departments and users we were looking at. But I didn’t want to go down the Oracle or Microsoft route – where you need to spend your time building a system from scratch and spending a fortune on consultants and implementation experts.” 

The software quickly paid for itself, as the time taken to produce management accounts has been cut by two-thirds. 

The fact that iplicit was a product created for the cloud was important. “I was keen to have something that had been built that way from scratch, rather than an existing system had been polished up a bit,” says Ben. “The other reason we went for iplicit was that it seemed to be the right scale for the charity."

“I felt systems such as Xero and QuickBooks would probably struggle with the number of departments and users we needed. But on the other hand, I know we didn't need an ERP solution – these systems where you need to build a system from scratch and spend a fortune on consultants and implementation experts.” 

Ben Thomas
Interim Director of Finance at Age Scotland

 The impact of iplicit 

Staff have found iplicit easy to use and intuitive, and the array of functionality in iplicit made an immediate impact on the charity, says Ben. 

“The experience has been very positive. The iplicit staff I've dealt with are knowledgeable, keen and they understand who we are, and the system does exactly what we wanted. Now, we can reconcile the bank account in a few hours," says Ben. 

“The workflows for authorising costs were a hugely positive change. In the past, invoices would be manually emailed to budget holders, asking them to sign off an confirm the code they would like the costs to be posted to.  You’d get email threads with lots of back and forth and approval bottlenecks, caused by varying response times.

“Now, if an invoice comes in, it’s automatically emailed by the system to the relevant budget holder, who can sign it off in iplicit. We've also managed to make the workflows more complex, to suit our needs - so for invoices over £200, iplicit also automatically sends them to a line manager for additional authorisation. If it’s above £10,000, it goes to the relevant director too. 

"With iplicit, we can issue the management accounts in a third of the time." 

Ben Thomas
Interim Director of Finance at Age Scotland

"Perhaps the biggest advantage is the live visibility on data. We still have Excel-based monthly management accounts that can be turned into PDFs and distributed to everybody, but everyone from budget holder upwards has access to their department’s data on iplicit. They can see their monthly and year-to-date budget variances, full-year budget and what they have remaining. 

“They can drill down to see individual transactions, and go even further to see invoices, associated emails and back-up documentation.  

“This has been a huge change and means there are around 40 people throughout the organisation getting value from iplicit, rather than the four or five that used the previous finance system.” 

Expenses are significantly easier, with staff able to submit receipts as photos on their phones using the iplicit app, along with automated authorisation processes. “This generates a lot of goodwill towards the new system, because people see it really helping them,” says Ben. 

iplicit also makes quick work of partial VAT calculations. “On a typical cost, we can only claim about 3% of VAT back,” says Ben. “Since going live with iplicit, we can factor in irrecoverable VAT from the outset, rather than everyone being caught out by it being added to their costs six months in arrears.” 

“With iplicit we can reconcile the bank account in a few hours, rather than through cash postings at the end of the month."

Ben Thomas
Interim Director of Finance at Age Scotland

“Anyone who works in the charity sector knows that funds are limited and there are decisions to be made to make sure money is spent properly. Money and budgets are part of what we do, so the more visible this work can be – and the less time-consuming it can be – the better."

Ben Thomas
Interim Director of Finance at Age Scotland

• “You don’t want somebody who's meant to be making an impact spending a day every week trying to find out where they are financially – or stressing out because they don't know what they're spending or getting surprises from the financial reports. Whatever their interactions with finance and budgets, it needs to be as streamlined as possible.” 

  By saving time and improving efficiency, the system has contributed to the charity’s core mission of working towards a Scotland which is the best place in the world to grow older. 

  • Want to see how iplicit could transform your finance function? Find out more about how we help charities.