Crisis UK selects Advanced Business Solutions system to support long-term growth strategy

Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people, is implementing a financial management system (FMS) from Advanced Business Solutions (ABS), formerly COA Solutions. This finance system, which will include electronic procurement and document imaging functionality, will support Crisis’ ambitious growth plans. It will also improve financial reporting and provide the charity with greater control over procurement.

Crisis UK required an FMS with the scalability and flexibility to support its growth plans. The charity, which has expanded significantly in recent years, currently operates from three locations across the UK with plans to open offices in Birmingham and Oxford within the next year. There are also plans to open additional UK offices moving forward.

Susie Beasley-Suffolk, Head of Finance at Crisis, says: “Our existing system is outdated, restrictive and unable to meet the needs of a fast growing organisation. To make it fit for purpose we would need to employ more staff which would be costly and inefficient.”

Beasley-Suffolk continues: “We selected ABS’s finance system as we were impressed with its rich reporting functionality, ability to analyse income and expenditure in granular detail and the system’s scalability, which will be able to support our growing company for ten years or more. ABS also has an excellent reputation within the not-for-profit sector and demonstrated a strong understanding of our needs.”

By implementing ABS’s FMS, Crisis will significantly improve the visibility and accessibility of financial information across the organisation, resulting in improved decision making and greater financial control. It will also be easier for Crisis UK to tailor financial reports to meet its specific needs.

Beasley-Suffolk comments: “ABS’s finance system will provide our senior management and trustees with more comprehensive financial information in a timelier manner. This will give us a better understanding of how and where we are spending our money to ensure it is being spent appropriately. The system will also provide budget holders with real-time access to financial data instead of them having to request this from finance, freeing up the finance department’s time.”

In addition, by linking Crisis’ The Raiser’s Edge fundraising management system with ABS’s FMS, Crisis will have a consolidated and real-time view of all fundraising income. The charity will also be able to quickly identify income and expenditure by individual funders on each project, further improving financial visibility.

Crisis will train up to 60 members of staff across the organisation on using the system so that they will be able to raise purchase orders themselves. These purchase orders will get channelled to the relevant managers for approval.

Furthermore, using the integrated document imaging functionality (which uses Version One’s technology), inbound paper invoices will be scanned, indexed and then linked to the relevant ledger in the finance system. Invoices with approved purchase orders will be automatically matched and paid. Those requiring authorisation will be automatically routed to the appropriate staff for approval, eliminating the time-consuming and costly circulation of 6,000 paper invoices every year.

Beasley-Suffolk says: “By eliminating paper-based purchase-to-pay processes, we will save significant amounts of time across the organisation whilst gaining tighter control over procurement. We will also free-up onsite storage space and no longer have to pay expensive third party archiving costs to store and retrieve our documents.”

Beasley-Suffolk adds: “ABS’s system will facilitate our growth, allowing us to fulfil the company’s evolving needs without having to take on significant additional resource in the finance team.”