Children's Hospice Trust will use accounting software to improve financial information, management reports and budget control.
Acorns, a leading charity which supports life limited children and their families, has invested in the region of £35,000 in new accounting and business management software from PS Financials.
The PS Financials system will enable Acorns Children's Hospice Trust to produce more effective, timely financial reports for its managers. These reports will provide managers with highly accurate information which enables them to make better budgetary decisions, improving financial control across the organisation. In addition, Acorns now has a very clear audit trail which ensures that donations go to the right charitable causes.
Jim Tindall, Acorns Director of Finance, says, "The flexibility of PS Financials was a key feature for us, especially the flexibility of reporting. The system takes away the grind of doing all the manual reconciliations & allows our accountants to concentrate on what they should be doing. PS Financials is much more flexible in how it stores data, making it easy to access the right information at the right time, whilst enabling us to slice and dice data in a number of ways for the purpose of producing management reports."
He continues, "We are an expanding charity and wanted a system that would be able to grow with us. A key feature of PS Financials is that it can support the three users we currently have on the system, whilst also being able to scale up to as many as 400 users as we expand. We expect to have 14 to 15 users by the end of the year and we are looking at rolling out the system to our retail stores within the next five years so the implementation of PS Financials provides us with a modern, future-proof software investment."
Acorns is also taking advantage of tailor-made, User Defined Input (UDI) screens provided by the PS Financials system. The UDI screens were of particular interest to Acorns because of our expanding retail division. On a weekly basis the shops produce shop returns, and through PS Financials these returns can be automatically reconciled and checked against what is being banked. The UDI screens are very user-friendly which means data input is much easier, quicker and more accurate with fewer mistakes now being made.
Tindall says, "PS Financials' consultants were very professional and well organised throughout the implementation process and since we have gone live the ongoing support has been very good. The system is very easy to use and we are already adding more value back to the organisation as a result of the improved reporting and budgetary controls that we now have in place."
Acorn Children's Hospice Trust cares for life-limited children and their families from across the West Midlands region and since 1988 they have helped 1100 families. Acorns Community team also offers an extensive range of psycho-social as well as practical support to children and families in their own homes. | 
