Hospice sees dramatic improvement with new accounting system from iplicit

UPGRADING the accounting software transformed the efficiency of the Lewis-Manning Hospice finance team, saving days every month. But it also made a real difference to the charity’s vital front-line work.

“Four years ago, we were seeing around 350 patients a year,” says Susan Newcombe, Director of Retail.

“Today, we’re seeing more than 800 patients a year, so that alone – in terms of staffing capacity and managing their time – is an indication of how our workloads have dramatically increased.

“iplicit really has been central in helping us to manage that transition.”

About Lewis-Manning

Lewis-Manning Hospice Care supports people with life-limiting illnesses, both at its Poole day hospice and at clinics across the East Dorset community, as well as providing family and bereavement support.

It has an income of around £3.4m, with around 100 staff, a series of charity shops and a division for marketing and fundraising. The hospice has subsidiary companies running the shops and a fundraising lottery.

Florence Tyler, Assistant Accountant said:

“Our services are expanding and the number of charity shops has more than doubled over the last three years. We just couldn’t keep up with the manual entry required for that number of invoices and bank transactions.

“We had a system that was very old and clunky.”

Trevor Arthur, Finance Officer and Company Secretary added:

“Everything took a long time and we had to input all the data ourselves in the finance department.

“For example, people had to fill in their expenses and timesheets on A4 paper and send them to their manager, who signed them off and gave them to us so that we typed in the information and hopefully paid it by payday.”

Allocating salaries to the correct shops was one task that took four hours of work on a spreadsheet every month.

The heavy reliance on paperwork also required somewhere to store it – 166 miles away in Birmingham.

Florence said:

“With the new shops and everything else that was coming online, we were under so much pressure that if we didn’t do something to streamline our procedures or employ more staff, we would be sinking.

“We knew we needed software with a workflow system, because we couldn’t keep chasing directors for signatures, and ideally others in the organisation should be able to use the software themselves.

“It had to be easy to pick up and self-explanatory, so people outside finance wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by it. And we needed something totally electronic because we had so much paper.

“We looked at other packages, including Sage and Xero, but those are huge organisations and if you’ve got an issue, you can’t just put in a call and get a response within 24 hours,” says Florence.

“With iplicit being UK-based, there’s someone on the end of the phone or who will respond quickly to an email. It was important to have that sort of support.”

‘We’ve saved days, not hours’

iplicit has transformed working life at Lewis-Manning – starting with the time-consuming manual tasks.

Trevor said:

“We used to do our bank reconciliation manually at the end of the month. Now iplicit goes to the bank feed, drags in all the information and we just review the matches.

“That’s been huge – but being able to integrate our shop till system with iplicit has probably been even bigger.

“We used to spend two or three days at the end of the month updating all the retail sales figures. We had to type everything in manually, with more than 500 transactions a month for the retail operation alone. With iplicit, we’ve got a daily import file that comes from the tills in the shops and we just upload 16-18 invoices.”

Expenses are completed by the staff on the road, who use the iplicit mobile app to photograph receipts and submit their claims. Budget holders can approve spending wherever they are.

Susan said:

“Instead of returning to head office to be given a pile of invoices to sign and be scanned, I can log into iplicit on my phone, see the invoices allocated to my budget code or budget line and authorise them in real-time.”

A complex system for authorising spending on bank staff has been similarly simplified.

Susan added:

“You’re talking about saving a couple of days, rather than just hours.”

‘People can see information in real-time’

The charity is now able to track and analyse the finances in ways it couldn’t before.

Susan said:

“In retail, we can look back over the past three years to see where the trends are and where our income’s coming from, allowing us to plan for the coming year.”

Staff can serve themselves with the information they need.

Trevor said:

“People can log in and look at things themselves rather than say ‘Can you give us this information by Wednesday?’

“We’re developing specific dashboards for each department, so the first screen they see when they login will be their major KPI.”

‘We’d have needed a team of 100’

Susan said:

“We’re in the middle of a growth strategy, both in the reach of our clinical services and in our income-generating activities.

“Having expanded our chain of shops, we’ve given ourselves a lot more work and we have more income coming through the system.

“We couldn’t have done all that without iplicit. We’d have needed a team of 100.”

Find out more about how iplicit helps charities and nonprofits.