PS Financials gives 4Children real time budgetary control & robust management reporting

Children’s charity 4Children has access to detailed, accurate and real time financial information thanks to PS Financials - accounting software which is flexible enough to assist with their plans to share financial processes and information between Head Office and a number of regional locations.

Formed in 1982 as the National Out-Of-Schools Alliance, 4Children is a charitable organisation with an income of £4-5m, which supports and develops activity and learning programmes for children and their families. The organisation also offers strategic support on a wide range of children’s issues, including a consultancy service for local authorities. 4Children operates from a number of locations, with offices in London and Essex and new children’s centres being rolled out in regional neighbourhoods around the UK.

PS Financials was the most suited accounting software for the Charity

As a Finance Manager with wide-ranging experience of working on other accounting software implementations, 4Children’s Financial Controller Kevin Randall was tasked with producing a spec for a new accounting system and highlighting the organisation’s key requirements. The withdrawal of support for their existing financial system accelerated 4Children’s search for a new accounting software package.

“4Children needed more flexibility within the chart of accounts to reflect and accommodate organisational change”, notes Kevin.

“One of the things we were looking for was flexibility in reporting, being able to analyse numbers on a number of different levels. Looking to the future, we also needed a system which would enable non-financial people to work remotely and access financial information from different locations.”

With these requirements in mind, a shortlist of suitable packages was drawn up. Kevin recalls:

“We looked at Sage and Microsoft Great Plains but neither seemed flexible enough for us, bearing in mind we are currently building a regional network of offices. PS Financials was the most suitable accounting software for us as we can tailor it to our exact needs, for example, by customising user screens.”

Implementing PS Financials to a tight timescale was possible with good support and consultancy

4Children made the decision to implement PS Financials and wanted to go live in a short timescale to coincide with their financial year end. 4Children visited several other charities already using PS Financials to assess how it worked in a ‘real’ environment so they knew what they wanted to achieve in their tight implementation timescale.

According to Kevin, “With our self-imposed deadline we didn’t have the time to allocate for our own testing so we asked other Charities who were already using the software for their experiences with PS Financials. The main thing that came across, which reassured us completely, was the quality of support the other charities had received, both from the PS Financials helpdesk and consultants”.

4Children had PS Financials live on schedule as planned for the beginning of their new financial year. Typically new PS Financial users migrate all of their historic data across to PS Financials, but because some of the financial information contained within their old system was unreliable, 4Children opted to import opening balances and re-code them within PS Financials.

“We decided to cut off at year end and manually control our aged debtors and creditors”, recalls Kevin.

The benefits of using PS Financials are evident immediately to the Charity, notably with Reporting.

One of the key benefits Kevin and the finance staff have noticed immediately has been the ability to generate robust, accurate and real-time reports from PS Financials.

“We can now look at actuals against budgets, broken down in a number of different ways - by budget groups, directorates and departments. We have also set up a nominal ledger across the organisation. Once you set up nominal codes, the system does the reports for you. Our Finance Director often requires analysis in a variety of ways, including the CIPFA format, which is a complex set-up, but easy to manage with PS Financials”, observes Kevin.

He adds “It was an impressive achievement for us to produce a budget report as we couldn’t do this before with our old system – but with PS Financials it’s straightforward. We are using Vision in conjunction with PS Financials for our reporting; it is very powerful but is still easy to use.”

4Children are now focusing on customising input screen displays and training staff on the new system. They opted to use a ‘train the trainer’ approach, where Kevin was trained on the new system and was then able to roll this out to the accounting users and casual users of PS Financials within the organisation.

“We found PS Financials very intuitive, and to a large extent my colleagues have managed to train themselves”, observes Kevin.

4Children will link PS Financials with other business systems and expand access to financial information across regional offices

4Children are planning to integrate PS Financials with a new contacts database system, and a new Payroll system. PS Financials is designed to link seamlessly with other business systems, something which 4Children are planning to take full advantage of.

With plans to expand and set up additional regional offices, 4Children are looking to make good use of the remote access capabilities of PS Financials. Kevin states:

“We work in nine regions across the UK and have an eventual aim of creating children’s centres in each region. We hope to move some financial work to the regions by the end of next year and to provide up-to-date information to these offices and other staff working remotely from home.”

There are plans to roll out access to PS Financials using the Internet. With remote web access in place, 4Children staff will have secure, real-time access to financial information at any time, from any location.

4Children have a clear financial picture of their Charity with PS Financials

For Kevin Randall, 4Children has already made great progress in how it manages its financial information.

“As a direct result of implementing PS Financials our main achievement has been bringing the organisation’s reporting up to speed. Before PS Financials was implemented, budgets and management accounts took a great effort to produce. These are now produced with little effort, and it is going to be noticeable when we put together next years’ budget as people have a much better handle on the financial data of the charity.”

He concludes:

“We have certainly saved time, reduced inputting and streamlined our work in the finance department. In PS Financials we now have accounting software that enables us to more clearly define what needs to be done - it has been money well spent!”

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PS Financials provides mid size organisations in the UK and worldwide with accounting software that delivers real results. Working directly with every organisation PS Financials delivers quality accredited Windows based software.

For more information visit: www.psfinancials.com

Email: [email protected]

Call: 01733 367330