Hove YMCA

A brighter future for children, young people & families

Company Overview

People talking The YMCA was established in London in 1844 to provide support and Christian fellowship for young men living alone in London. Hove YMCA was first established in 1919 and has been working in the local community ever since. In the last decade the organisation has grown dramatically and now provides a wide range of services across Brighton & Hove and Sussex. Although Hove YMCA works with all members of the community its aim is to meet the needs of young people through a variety of projects and Sussex-wide initiatives.

Hove YMCA offers help to many different young people, but especially those who are isolated and struggling through homelessness, exclusion from school, family breakdown, poor mental health or drug and alcohol problems.

The organisation has grown steadily over the last 15 years, from a turnover of around £50,000 in 1990 to just under £4 million in 2007. It employs 240 staff (including those working in the Hove YMCA shops) and have around 10,000 people using the organisation’s services each year. 40% of staff are volunteers.

Hove YMCA is presently reviewing its geographical remit as opportunities to provide services become available outside of Brighton & Hove. The organisation is already providing excellent services at Mid Sussex YMCA and other partnerships are being developed across Sussex.

The Challenge

Hove YMCA has seen a major growth in services over the past ten years. To facilitate future growth plans, Alan Brewster, Finance Manager of Hove YMCA, knew that the organisation would need to change its finance system. Its existing system - Sage Line 100 - was not going to be able to cope with the planned growth over the next 4-5 years.

Alan joined Hove YMCA in September 2004, he was concerned that even by November the organisation was only just producing its March 2004 accounts! Alan was not used to working in this manner and knew he needed to implement a new finance solution system quickly and efficiently.

Management accounting was a major issue, real-time, accurate information would need to be made more readily available and transparency would need to be vastly improved to enable the entire organisation to become more efficient and support the vast growth it was experiencing. Sage Line 100 was holding the organisation back with its complete lack of flexibility.

Another major issue to consider was the absence of any formal IT support within the organisation.Alan knew that when it came to choosing and implementing a new financial software solution that he was on his own. He would not have the ‘luxury’ of being be able to rely on any advice or recommendation from any in-house technical resource, something that many FDs in a similar situation would take for granted.

The Selection Process

After doing some research into the finance solutions available, Alan quickly reduced his shortlist to two vendors: Access and Exchequer.

After an initial meeting and a demonstration, Alan was thoroughly impressed with the Access solution, but what really sold the product to him was the demonstration provided by the Access Specialist Centre.

“Our Specialist Centre really understood what we wanted”, commented Alan. "The representatives obviously had much experience in the charity sector and gave us lots of advice on how the Access solution would be able to rectify the issues that we had.We were absolutely sold on the Access product before Exchequer even made further contact with us.Yes the Access product is good, but it was the people at the Specialist Centre that really swung it for us”.

Because of the lack of IT Department and technical expertise at Hove YMCA, Alan knew that they needed to partner with an organisation that could provide both excellent pre-sales advice and post-sales service. Based on his experience with the company thus far, Alan was confident that the Access Specialist Centre had the necessary expertise.

The Access Specialist Centre then provided a reference site – West London YMCA – and Alan contacted the FD at the organisation to check that their Dimensions installation had gone smoothly, on-time and to budget. After hearing glowing reports confirming all the above, he was ready to implement the Access solution.

The Solution

An implementation plan was drawn up and Go Live date targeted for the end of July 2005. The solution was implemented on-time and to budget.The Access Specialist Centre was tasked with implementing a system that would not only address the business issues outlined by Hove YMCA but also for the implementation to have a minimal impact on management changes throughout the company.

Firstly, Hove YMCA emphasised that powerful job costing functionality was essential. The Access Costing module mirrors what is in the nominal ledger, an extremely important function for the organisation.

Hove YMCA had a requirement to produce standard and enhanced reporting with ease, as this was essential to the organisation’s business processes. The organisation needed to set up a separate cost centre for each of its component parts (education, counselling, housing, sports, shops etc). A further cost centre would need setting up for each individual project (programme or service) offered, to monitor funding/ grants or expenditure associated with each.The initial projects that were set up totalled 35, now there are over 100.

Hove YMCA also needed the system to handle restricted and unrestricted funding for each of these projects, and Dimensions Lite was easily able to handle this. The organisation desperately needed to identify which areas of the business required greater funding and which areas would need to be reduced or cut due to lack of funding. It also needed to identify those programmes or services that were not being utilised fully.

Reporting on each cost centre is easily distributed to managers throughout the organisation, and this was achieved by using standard reports available in Dimensions Lite.This information allows Hove YMCA to make better management decisions.

This is reflected in the organisation’s turnover - since the Dimensions Lite system has been in place turnover has risen from £2m to £3.8m. Over the months, when needing advice or guidance,Alan has contacted his Specialist Centre’s helpdesk and tested the post-sales consultancy that was such an important factor during the selection process. “The helpline is very efficient”, commented Alan.

The Future

Hove YMCA is looking to expand the solution to cope with its demanding changing business processes.“The system is so flexible and boasts so much functionality”, remarked Alan,“We know we are presently only scratching the surface”.

“The organisation has recently upgraded the system to the latest version so it can pay its many suppliers using BACS.” The Chief Executive is particularly pleased that we now use BACS to pay our suppliers, as he doesn’t have to sign hundreds of cheques!” added Alan.

The next stage is to implement Access Payroll. Presently Hove YMCA uses a payroll bureau which costs £9k a year. Implementing Access Payroll will cut the payroll costs dramatically and will mean that the re-keying of information is considerably reduced too.