PS Financials Accounting Software allows Glyndebourne Opera House to effectively manage its diverse financial requirements and keep abreast of rapidly-changing VAT regulations.
Founded in 1934, Glyndebourne is one of the world's most eminent opera houses.
Best known for its summer festivals, Glyndebourne also produces UK-wide tours and runs a busy Education department, working with youth opera groups, and running workshops and study days as well as full-scale community operas. Glyndebourne is unique in that although it is a not for profit organisation it receives no state or public subsidy but is funded by box office income, sponsorship and donations from corporate companies and individuals.
When Glyndebourne implemented PS Financials at the beginning of 2005, it replaced a bespoke accounting system that lacked the flexibility to readily support the organisation through its current stage of expansion. Set up as two separate charities - one of which manages a festival, tour and education programme, the other is a fundraising charity - and a separate trading company covering media development initiatives, hires of productions and shop and mail order activities, Glyndebourne's financial software needed to be able to handle a diverse range of requirements.
PS Financials automates Partial VAT recovery and control
Changes in the rules regarding VAT recovery following the introduction of VAT Cultural Exemption were the catalyst for Glyndebourne to implement a new finance system, and they turned to PS Financials for their wealth of experience and knowledge in the charitable sector. Glyndebourne is able to recover a percentage of VAT as a result of Cultural Exemption, but this requires VAT to be reported in a very robust manner. Carolyn Collard, Finance Manager at Glyndebourne, explains:
"The introduction of partial VAT exemption has had huge implications in accounting terms for Glyndebourne, and our old systems simply weren't able to cope. With PS Financials the whole process for calculating the total VAT and the recoverable VAT can be fully automated."
A quick implementation process - the system was purchased at the end of October 2004 and was live by 1 January 2005 - was completed smoothly, followed by a 'train-the-trainer' style programme to get staff acquainted with the system.
"We made a decision to use PS Financials to train one member of our own staff. She was then able to roll out training across the company to finance and non-finance users, and this has worked really well, improving our internal procedures and reducing implementation costs", notes Collard.
PS Financials helps to relieve administrative burden on financial staff
It was important to Glyndebourne that the chosen finance software would provide new business benefits as well as effectively managing their VAT requirements. With PS Financials, not only does the finance department now have access to 'real-time' accounting information and a true picture of financial performance at all times, but access to the finance system has been extended to non-finance users throughout the organisation.
"What is happening now is that we have a significant number of non-finance users trained in how to look things up in PS Financials to answer their own questions and to check their budgets without having to contact the accounts department" notes Collard.
All this means that the administrative burden on the financial department has been significantly reduced.
"As the organisation is expanding, implementing the system has made a big impact on the finance department", observes Collard.
"In the past, we would have expected to have to increase our staff numbers to manage the growth of the company, but we have been able to cope easily with our existing finance staff base so have saved on any additional staffing costs."
Carolyn Collard adds: "We have also made time savings, which are a result of the flexibility of PS Financials. For example, we are proactive with exception reporting now, and we can identify problems in good time for them to be resolved. The ability to instantly email answers to queries is great - we also email all our monthly management reports so there are savings made on time and paper there too".
Allowing non-financial users to access information, plus the time saved on reporting and getting answers to financial queries quickly and easily to other staff, has meant that the finance department at Glyndebourne is able to offer a higher value added level of service than before.
Complex payroll reporting is made simple as PS Financials works seamlessly with other business software
Glyndebourne are also very pleased with the way PS Financials works alongside their existing systems. "We are impressed with how easy it is to import information from other systems, particularly our payroll system, into PS Financials", notes Collard.
"We have a complex pay reporting structure, in that we report as many costs as possible at a production level by allocating staff to individual shows. We have both monthly and weekly paid staff, many of whom complete very detailed timesheets allocating their time and extra payments to several different cost centres across a range of different shows. We are able to import all of this data directly from the payroll system into PS Financials, and the high level of detail is invaluable when we are assessing variances to budgets.
Our Tour orchestra, for example, receive a weekly fee calculated according to the shows that they have played for: paying them used to take a whole day but this task is now completed in under an hour. We now import all the payment information directly from the spreadsheet emailed to us by the orchestra manager into PS Financials instead of printing the spreadsheet and re-keying details as we had to with our previous accounting system."
PS Financials also links seamlessly with Tessitura, Glyndebourne's CRM tool, which manages marketing, box office and fundraising information.
"We can track sales and refunds through our box office on a daily basis, in addition to transactions from our membership and fundraising department - to be able to get that information into the financial system automatically is fantastic, and could well result in savings in the next year or so."
Future plans for Glyndebourne are supported by PS Financials
Moving forward, another recent landmark case ruling on VAT will have an impact on Glyndebourne, but Carolyn Collard is confident that this hurdle will be easily overcome because PS Financials is able to adapt easily to such changes.
"We will have to rebuild our VAT rules for the second time in less than 2 years, but the flexibility of PS Financials will make this a straightforward process. We have recently spent a day working with our PS Financials consultant, who knows our business really well by now, and have completely re-vamped our VAT reporting."
PS Financials has also allowed Glyndebourne to put in place another unplanned change to the way its touring company accounts are produced.
"We produce accounts for each of our venues for the Arts Council, sponsors and other grant-making bodies. In the past, these accounts have been produced separately, post-audit. By adapting our ledger set-up we can track all necessary information as soon as the data is in the system. We can then run off Tour accounts in-house with virtually no additional workload whilst saving the fees we used to pay to external accountants."
Collard concludes, "We implemented PS Financials during a period of massive change at Glyndebourne. With the effects of the VAT exemption ruling and other development issues, it has been quite a dynamic period for us from a finance angle too. Having implemented PS Financials, our support costs are now much lower and we have a very modern, user-friendly accounting system that can scale up and adapt to our demands as we continue to grow. We have also been able to provide non-accounts staff in Glyndebourne with access to real time financial information on a show or department, improving the service we offer and allowing the finance team to swiftly process data and then focus on analysis and interpretation." | 
