Reprieve

The challenge

Legacy system couldn’t integrate or track restricted funds

Reprieve was struggling with an on-premises finance system that wasn’t suited to charities. The accounting system couldn’t track restricted funds well and didn’t integrate with the charity’s expenses system. It could not provide budget holders with quick reports or the ability to easily approve invoices.  

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Reprieve’s busy team of three finance staff had to deal with transactional work and meet the reporting demands of a diverse range of funders including trusts and foundations, statutory funders, corporate donors and individual giving. “Our previous system was not well suited to the nuances of our business model” says Hubert Hutchinson, Head of Finance. “It was therefore a challenge to get reports to budget holders and it doesn’t lend itself well to our model where we have a complex mix of restricted funded projects.

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“Expenses had to be approved by email, which created a messy way of working to say the least. And when it came to reporting, you had to export data into Excel and do a lot of manipulation to get it into a format suitable for sharing with budget holders.”

The solution

System is saving time and providing better data

Reprieve had been preparing to upgrade accounting systems – but when Hubert joined the charity, he reviewed that plan and changed direction. “I met the supplier for a demonstration but they couldn’t quite sell it to me as the system to go with,” he says. “A lot of what they were demonstrating wasn’t relevant to us as a charity. It was more relevant to a medium-sized or larger for profit business corporation.”

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Hubert discovered iplicit through online research and read some of its nonprofit case studies. “Around that time, we recruited a finance manager from an organisation that had just implemented iplicit and following a conversation with them that reinforced my decision to go with iplicit. I also spoke to another charity of similar size to ours that was using iplicit which reassured me that I was making the right choice,” he says.

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“I knew iplicit was tailored to the charity sector and could do project tracking, which is important because we have to be able to separate our restricted funds and report against them accurately. The fact that it had an integrated expenses system and good workflow capabilities was important as well.”

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Implementation was led by iplicit project manager Elaine Dumore. “She was brilliant. I couldn’t fault her,” says Hubert. The team has seen a host of benefits from the move:

• Speed and reliability: “The system is a lot faster,” says Hubert. “Previously, everything was at a snail’s pace – and if you need to do a backup, which we often needed to do, you have to make sure everyone else is out of the system and this really slowed down the team’s work.”  

• Easy reporting: “Creating reports in iplicit is far quicker than our previous system. With iplicit, once you’ve set the parameters, it’s quite easy and within a few seconds of clicking a button, it’s exported into Excel.”  

• Simple bank reconciliation: The process of reconciling the bank account is “a lot faster”.

• Improved workflows: The team has proper, automated approval workflows for the first time. “Finance can just upload an invoice, it gets submitted to the appropriate budget holder for approval and the source document is retained in the system for audit purposes,” says Hubert.  

The outcome

System has had a ‘revolutionary’ impact on finance work

iplicit has had a big impact on the charity, giving budget holders better control over their projects.  “The ability to share budget vs actual reports with budget holders within the system has been revolutionary,” says Hubert. “Previously, we had to build reports in Excel by extracting data from the finance system and rearranging it. Now, budget holders have the access they need.”

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He adds: “Changing finance system was a challenging process because I was doing the day job while managing the implementation and transition. But I don’t have any regrets about going with iplicit because it’s the way forward – it’s a modern ERP system, which is what we need.”  

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