Birmingham Institue for the Deaf

Birmingham Institute for the Deaf Improves Financial Control. The UK's voluntary sector is reeling under the two fold barrage of reduced donations and increasing financial reporting requirements.

 

Birmingham Institute for the Deaf turned to Exchequer to deliver the rapid, accurate and consistent financial information required to maximise resources, monitor overheads and support strategic growth.

 

The charity is now leveraging Exchequer's tight links with Microsoft Excel to produce management accounts and statutory reports such as SOFA (Statement of Financial Activities) rapidly, with minimal administrative overhead. Improved information combined with faster turnaround of invoice production has enabled the organisation to reduce its debtor days, while multi-dimensional analysis is supporting improved understanding of its cost base across multiple service offerings.

 

Founded in 1899, the Birmingham Institute for the Deaf (BID) has developed a reputation for providing innovative, high quality services to meet the many and varied needs of deaf people. BID has 120 full time staff and 50 volunteers and an annual income of £4 million used to provide services to deaf people in Birmingham, Solihull and the West Midlands.

 

Despite the increasing pressures on charitable donations and the challenge to win a share of financial commitment from a plethora of other charitable organisations, from child welfare to hospice provision, BID is experiencing significant growth. The introduction of the Supporting People Service, in April 2003, has prompted an increase in revenue. Indeed, over the past three years, the institute has seen revenue increase by 50%.

 

Michael Price, (Finance and ICT Director) of Birmingham Institute for the Deaf, explains, "In common with a number of voluntary, community sector organisations, BID's primary objective is to ensure we spend our limited financial resources effectively by providing a full range of services for the deaf community, most of which are not satisfactorily funded via local or central government. The main challenge we face as an organisation is to recover full costs on our contracts."

 

Three years ago BID's levels of overdue debt were inappropriately high and its cash position poor. Critically, the finance department was struggling to attain the insight into financial performance required to support strategic direction.  "An inability to access information combined with unclear reporting structures and accountability was severely constraining BID's ability to monitor financial performance," Price confirms.

 

 

 

 

BID decided to replace its Sage accounting product with a new system that could deliver improved management reporting information. Following a market review, BID opted for Exchequer from IRIS Enterprise Software. "The primary objective was to implement a system that made the process of inputting and retrieving information simple and timely," says Price. "Exchequer's tight integration with Microsoft Excel also means that there was no need to learn how to use an inflexible report generator."

 

BID was also keen to avoid expensive consultancy charges for each upgrade or system enhancement. Exchequer's scaleability and ease of implementation ensures that the system can continue to support BID without additional overheads. Furthermore, Exchequer's ease of operation enables BID to simply add new departments when additional services, such as Supporting People, are added.

 

The charity was also impressed with Exchequer's ODBC links, which ease the integration with other applications, such as the database that supports BID's Interpreting Service, and the tight level of integration with the organisation's payroll software.

 

Says Price, "The ease with which information is entered into Exchequer has significantly reduced the administrative overhead, releasing finance staff to concentrate on more productive activity such as analysing costs."

 

Furthermore, BID has been able to speed up the production of invoices which, combined with clearer management information, has removed the problem of long-term overdue sales invoices. He adds, "Bank reconciliation is now done daily, as is the cash position, enabling the finance team to focus on analysing performance."

 

Indeed, the quality, timeliness and accuracy of management information now available has transformed the charity's understanding of its cost base. Furthermore, the link between Exchequer and Microsoft Excel has enabled BID to produce management accounts within a day, a process that used to take a week, while the creation of annual statutory accounts has been streamlined. Says Price, "Information gathering has been transformed from a tedious, time consuming process to a straightforward, often automated activity.

 

The production of SORP reports is now simply another version of the Management accounts – information is consistent and is very easy to access at all times."  Furthermore, BID is using Exchequer's multi-dimensional analysis to achieve a detailed understanding of its costs. "We can look at spend per cost centre, or per department and drill down through the detail to get real understanding of cost anomalies," he says.

 

For example, BID can now review its telecommunications cost by department, undertaking detailed analysis to ascertain where cost savings could be made. Actual spend against budgets can be reviewed with the 12 budget holders, using the drill down capabilities to understand patterns in expenditure.

 

"Exchequer is also enabling BID to proactively monitor the performance of new services. Each new service becomes a cost centre with an established budget, providing a benchmark for rapid assessment of the success of any new strategic direction," Price confirms.

 

Over the next few months BID plans to implement the Exchequer Purchase Order system and also the automation of the production of some 2,500 sales invoices annually.

 

Price concludes, "Exchequer has not only provided rapid access to excellent management

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information but it also gives us a platform to manage and support BID's planned growth. Critically, Exchequer enables us to upgrade and add functionality at any time without incurring the huge consultancy fees associated with many financial software products, costs that are simply untenable within the voluntary sector."