In PS Financials, leading recruitment specialist, Harvey Nash, has found a finance package to fit the bill in any economic climate.
Automating administrative processes to the maximum makes sense regardless of where you are in the economic cycle. Going into a downturn, automation helped to keep overheads down at times when money was tight; coming back up on the other side, it will allow more business to be processed for the same administrative outlay.
No-one understands that better than the Harvey Nash Group,
Harvey Nash has chosen PS Financials as the solution to see it through business vicissitudes without the need to scale the finance team proportionately. "PS Financials gives us the flexibility and power you'd expect from a top-end package with the added benefits of a more affordable price tag and fast implementation," sums up UK Finance Director, Simon Michaels.
THE BUSINESS NEED
Established in 1988, Harvey Nash is now a global operation with over 30 offices and 550 plus staff worldwide. It turned over £226 million in the financial year to 2001. As well as being a household name in IT-related executive recruitment, it also recruits in the healthcare, finance, media and most other sectors - in each case specialising in senior staff. Harvey Nash also provides its clients with Contract Staff services, Interim management, File search and Resource management.
During 2000, the recruitment business was booming and, since Harvey Nash's previous accounting solution was coming to the end of its useful life, it made sense to look for a replacement. "We had simply out-grown the old system," explains Simon Michaels. "It wasn't the latest technology and it did not provide Harvey Nash with the flexibility it required in its reporting. We decided to look for a new system that would satisfy our needs for the medium term."
CHOOSING PS FINANCIALS
Reviewing the financial systems marketplace, Harvey Nash was drawn to what was then a new system, PS Financials. "We were attracted by its ease of use, and by its ability to be tailored to the needs of our specific business without the need for programming or enormous implementation projects. In fact the implementation was very quick with us starting to benefit from the change to PS Financials in a matter of weeks."
Because of external constraints, the company made the difficult decision to switch over to PS Financials in mid-year, necessitating the conversion of six months' worth of data from the old system. Additional complications included the need to interface to existing systems, notably a financial reporting system and a contractor payroll package.
Despite all this complexity, the transition to PS Financials was completed successfully in three months.
EXPERIENCING THE BENEFITS OF BETTER INFORMATION
After weathering the inevitable hard work of a fast implementation, Harvey Nash was soon experiencing the advantages. "It has some great features," says Simon Michaels. An important one is the flexibility of the account code structures and the consequent versatility in reporting. "We run a number of companies in different areas of recruitment, and we need to be able to report them together and separately. By setting up your account codes correctly, you can easily report either across all your companies or within individual companies. You can also group the companies together in various ways, such as by division."
Another invaluable feature is PS Financials' drill-down capabilities. "It's now very simple to explore information at various levels, clicking on a trial balance, say, and going down to look at the individual accounts and then to the underlying transactions. It makes it much easier to sort out any anomalies, so you get a true picture sooner rather than later."
The system's reporting capabilities, too, have been an improvement. The formats are better, and the information is much more comprehensive. Recently, for instance, we've produced a sector analysis of our turnover. Sorting individual clients by sector was an arduous task, but PS Financials has an index facility that lets you categorise clients by industry, enabling instant reporting."
Most of the reports in current use have been pre-written by PS Financials. Simon Michaels intends to create new reports in house, on an ad-hoc basis. To that end, he's inviting PS Financials' specialists in to conduct an audit of the current information in use and to suggest possible improvements.
FREE TO ADD VALUE
With less time eaten up by routine reporting, the Finance department is now free to focus on tasks that add value to the business - tasks such as analysis of management information. For this sort of work PS Financials data is often fed into the accountants' favourite tool, Excel. "Downloading information into Excel is very straightforward. If you want to examine your legal and professional costs, you can get started at once without the need to key any data into the spreadsheet."
"That extra analysis helps the finance function make more of a contribution to the business, for example by monitoring costs and making sure that we're in a position to satisfy year-end audits. And we can easily produce reports in the format that management understands."
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
Simon Michaels regards PS Financials as a sensible business compromise between expensive high-end financial packages and cheap shrink-wrapped products. "It's very much cheaper than some competitors, and, while it can be used off-the-shelf if necessary, it differs from the lower-level packages in that you can tailor it for your business needs."
That versatility has stood Harvey Nash in good stead. "We were able to get started as quickly as possible with a plain-vanilla implementation of the system, and then go on to think about customising its screens and reports when we had more time and greater familiarity with the software. Even now, I don't think we're using even 75% of the system's capabilities."
Best of all, Harvey Nash has had the foresight to invest in a system that will support it comfortably in the anticipated upturn. "We expect to see growth in the market soon, particularly in the IT area and feel confident that we have a system that will cope with that growth."
TECHNICAL BOX
Database: Microsoft SQL Server
Network operating system: Windows NT
Number of users: 30 concurrent plus enquiry/input users at remote sites | 
