PS Financials has streamlined the accounting systems and practices of reinsurance broker, Robert Fleming Insurance Brokers Group, enabling finance staff to provide a comprehensive service and add value to business end-users quickly, easily and cost-effectively, while also laying down a solid foundation for innovative future business growth.
General accounting systems form the bedrock of any company's business, but arguably even more so for organisations operating in the highly regulated financial services sector. Systems have to be very flexible and scaleable to accommodate the peculiarities of the industry, as well as reliable and easy to use.
The resulting business benefits include the ability to analyse the company's existing financial situation in more depth whilst being able to slot in new business divisions and corporate acquisitions without increasing complexity or the finance department's headcount. This whole approach must save time and money while also making the business more efficient and effective.
Reinsurance specialist, Robert Fleming Insurance Brokers (RFIB) Group, has realised all these benefits and more by moving from a mainframe accounting package to PS Financials' true Windows and web-enabled financial accounting and business management software. This unified ledger system is designed around a single underlying database and provides advanced multi-currency functions.
The RFIB Group is a City-based reinsurance broker providing a wide range of risk services. The company consists of 5 trading divisions which together generate an annual turnover of approximately £25m.
Finding a business solution
Prior to the move to PS Financials, the RFIB Group had used another software company's accounting system. Following many system changes required to meet the challenges of the Year 2000 and Euro, the reinsurance broker decided to look for an alternative accounting system.
After looking at a number of alternatives, RFIB decided upon PS Financials for its modern environment, flexibility and User Defined input capabilities.
David Martin, RFIB's financial controller, was very impressed with PS Financials' performance, especially its multi-company, multi-currency and multi-dimensional analysis capabilities, and its ability to easily integrate with operational and feeder systems.
"PS Financials was an impressive product which had all the currency and analysis capability we needed," says Martin. "Other software houses seemed to think that dealing in four currencies was very complicated and they came up with exotic solutions when really we just needed four sets of books covering US$, Canadian $, Sterling and Euros. PS Financials understood what our problems were straightaway and proposed a solution which wasn't over-complicated, was reasonably priced, and which did the job, so we bought it."
Implementing the system
PS Financials and RFIB's finance staff worked closely over a couple of months to set up the Chart of Accounts. Using PS Financials' User Defined Interface (UDI), they also agreed the 'look and feel' of input screen displays - to automate complex postings and enforce business rules - and paper-based and electronic reports. Staff were trained on the new system and a system test proved that the design was workable. The system went live on 1st April 2001.
"PS Financials worked as it should right from the start," says Martin. "It was a quality controlled implementation. It helped that we knew what we wanted from the system at the outset, but the PS Financials team were very knowledgeable about our industry and had the right mix of technical and business knowledge."
Today, RFIB's finance staff use the PS Financials general ledger to hold the company's brokerage and other financial data in the 4 currencies in which it trades. The software is used for monitoring and transacting a hedging strategy in the three non-sterling currencies and allocating both income and expenses between the Group's trading divisions to determine each division's profit contribution.
Realising the benefits
"PS Financials is very user-friendly, flexible and scaleable," says Martin. "The system is also very robust and resilient. We've had very few problems with it at all since implementation, but on the rare occasions when we have PS Financials have satisfactorily demonstrated how they can fix it remotely. It's a really good set of ledgers, with flexibility that works."
The move to PS Financials has upgraded RFIB's accounting systems to the point where it can easily deliver more comprehensive business reports to internal staff.
"We can now produce more in-depth management reports and we can do these ourselves easily and quickly as and when we need them," says Martin. "In addition to income, divisional and company management can monitor travel and entertaining costs, by individual and geographical area, and assess profitability across different sub groupings. This helps them in their decision-making and enables them to target their business strategies."
Accounting and expenditure has also been tightened up, eliminating errors and duplications. For example, finance staff can now easily spot mis-postings and duplicated spend, say, on access charges to an information database where more than one division require access but are not aware that another division had already subscribed .
"These were much harder to trace before," says Martin. "Using PS Financials we can now drill-down into the detail we require quickly and easily."
The freed up time has been better spent on supporting RFIB's business growth. Martin says, "Since implementing PS Financials we've been able to incorporate one new division and one new company into our management accounting without having to increase our finance staff headcount. It has enabled us to work more efficiently."
Future plans
Moving forwards, Martin has plans to exploit PS Financials' Web ability to enable more remote access into company systems by staff.
"It will give us a competitive edge if we can remotely access statistical and historical information held centrally," says Martin. "Also, if we can get our brokers to complete their expenses online and then automatically map these into the general ledger, rather than submit manual returns as at present, we can eliminate the need to re-key data into the general ledger which is very time-consuming and labour-intensive."
In addition, Martin has plans to use PS Financials for e-business. He would like to settle accounts with RFIB's suppliers electronically.
"We could not have contemplated any of these new business directions with our old system," concludes Martin. "PS Financials has given us the confidence to progress and move our company forward and in our industry that is crucial to the future success of the business." | 
