About PS Financial Community Edition Page Two

The organisations got the go-ahead for the project last summer, with a go-live date of April 2006. The new system is fully funded by the government scheme which finances both brand new hardware and software for the accounting function for organisations which take part. Tracy notes; "One of the main advantages of PS Financials was that they didn't have any concerns about delivering to our tight timescale."

The key benefits the voluntary organisations expect to gain through implementing PS Financials are that it provides accounting information and management reports in a timely way to budget managers and trustees without extensive manual effort and re-keying of information. Unlimited budgets can be produced in PS Financials and reported on at any level e.g. by department, by project etc which the three voluntary organisations were not able to do before - instead relying on numerous separate Excel spreadsheets to record budget information.

PS Financials will enable Ryedale Voluntary Action, Scarborough and Whitby CVS to provide clearer information to their stakeholders - all of whom want data presented to them in different ways because it can manage all budget and project information from one central system. PS Financials allows unlimited budgets to be reported against.

Work on implementation of the new software reaches a peak in April 2006, as the three organisations plan to complete Year End on their old systems and start with the PS Financials system for the financial year 2006/2007. Staff have received their initial training and work is being undertaken to load new data on to PS Financials in stages, starting with full accounting information, and Purchase Order and Commitment Accounting to follow in a few weeks.

Ryedale Voluntary Action's experience with PS Financials Community Edition

Ryedale Voluntary Action needs to produce management information and accounts by individual project. Currently between 15 and 20 projects with different timescales for delivery and different grant funders are run by Ryedale Voluntary Action at any one time. Due to restrictions in the budgeting facilities of their previous system the only way to manage projects was by using separate Excel spreadsheets and re-keying information, but PS Financials Community

Edition is extremely flexible, allowing organisations increased detail and access to financial information so all of Ryedale's projects can now be managed within the one system.

Tracy Bramley, Ryedale Voluntary Action's Finance Manager, now has the financial information she needs to hand when required; "With PS Financials, we can set reports up so quickly they just 'fall out' of the system - reports for all our projects take just a few minutes to update but used to take us an entire week to compile! We were never able to easily provide reports for Trustees, budget holders or grant funders but PS Financials is able to handle reporting in many different ways, it is very adaptable".

Screen based reporting is standard in PS Financials and it is easy for Tracy to drill down to underlying data in the reports so that, for example, she can compare actuals against an unlimited number of budgets with little effort. Such a professional approach is likely to help Ryedale Voluntary Action secure significant future funding. Time saving from re-keying Excel based information (not to mention preventing data entry mistakes!) is replaced with direct data entry into the financial system with simple user-defined screens in PS Financials.

How do 3 voluntary organisations use 1 PS Financials?

Ryedale as the lead organisation in this instance is 'hosting' PS Financials Community Edition on its server with Whitby and Scarborough voluntary organisations accessing their accounts on the system remotely over the web using terminal services with a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Each of the 3 organisations have their own accounts on the system which is totally private and secure from the others - each can also set up their own accounts structure exactly how they want to (it doesn't have to be in the same format as the other 2 organisations 'sharing' the PS Financials software). So while it may seem that 3 organisations are 'sharing' one piece of software - they are actually all independent of one another and it's just that Ryedale is acting as host for the software. It's that simple - 3 voluntary organisations and 1 PS Financials.

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