When the Government's ChangeUp initiative offered Ryedale Voluntary Action, Whitby and Scarborough Voluntary Services in North Yorkshire an excellent opportunity to boost the efficiency of their financial processes and planning, PS Financials Community Edition maximised their return.
Ryedale Voluntary Action, the Scarborough & District Council for Voluntary Service and Whitby and District Voluntary Action provide support, advice, services and facilities to voluntary and community groups in their local areas. All are small organisations with limited funds available to them for improving back office systems. They had however signed up to the 'ChangeUp' scheme aiming to improve the infrastructure of CVS's through collaborative working and were keen to take this further.
ChangeUp is a central government fund aimed at improving the support services available to the voluntary & community sector so that they become more effective and efficient. Seeing a positive opportunity to work together for their joint benefit, the three voluntary organisations formed a consortium to apply for funding from ChangeUp to procure new financial systems, with Ryedale Voluntary Action appointed lead organisation.
As Ryedale Voluntary Action's Finance Manager Tracy Bramley explains, "A new system was the only way of improving efficiencies. There is complex and time consuming accounting involved in running a voluntary organisation which we struggle to do with the basic systems we have at present". (Ryedale Voluntary Action and Scarborough CVS have been using Sage Line 50, while Whitby CVS have relied solely on Excel spreadsheets for their financial reporting).
Tracy was appointed Project Leader to undertake research into possible software options and evaluate needs. The Consortium was given free reign to choose a suitable software system, and so a detailed software specification was developed and a shortlist of four suitable packages identified. The four options chosen - Sage MMS version, Sun Systems, Exchequer Enterprise and PS Financials - were looked at in detail and the consortium viewed demonstrations from Sage, Sun Systems and PS Financials before making their decision.
According to Tracy, "We were won over with PS Financials because we immediately liked the screen layout and 'Windows' style - it's user-friendly and easy to get around. We were also impressed with the unified ledger and flexible reporting functions."
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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