Sue Ryder Care

Care that Liberates Lives

Why Access?

For the past six years, Sue Ryder Care has been using Access Accounts to manage its finances. In 1998, the organisation discovered that its existing Selven software was not being developed and would not be Year 2000 compliant. This triggered the search for an alternative solution. Aided by Charity Finance magazine, the finance team chose to investigate four potential replacements – Sage, Pegasus, Sun Systems and Access Accounts. Financial Controller, Roger Cunningham remembers back to when Access Horizons was selected. “I had very set ideas about what I wanted to see in our accounts structure. The overriding need was for a system capable of producing monthly P&L reports for each of our retail shops. And we are very cost conscious, so we had a fairly small budget to cover software, hardware and networking costs.” “Sage was the cheapest option, but it could not provide us with the required levels of analysis. Pegasus and Sun Systems quoted over budget, and both were limited in terms of future expansion. Access Accounts was the only system that could deliver our analysis on budget. It also had far greater scope for drilling-down into underlying information.” Implementation began with the central finance office. Since then, Access has been rolled out to 10 of the 18 regional care centres – those felt to have administrative issues that Access could help with. Deployment to the remaining 8 centres is subject to a wider decision on the centralization of all financial accounting.

Managing the retail finances

Each of the 430 Sue Ryder shops is staffed primarily by volunteers who work only a few hours a week. Given this structure, the most cost-effective way to deal with daily sales returns is manually. With only 7% of the charity’s income going towards administrative, marketing and fundraising costs, the management team could not justify investing in hardware and software for 430 separate locations. However, technology is used centrally to conduct monthly reconciliations. Every Sue Ryder shop is treated as a separate Sales Ledger account. On a weekly basis, sales returns for each shop are posted into the accounts. Then, on a daily basis, data from electronic Lloyds Link bank statements is imported into Access. As the statements are reconciled Access Accounting Ltd – 0845 345 3300 against the cash banked for each shop, errors in banking can quickly be identified and the correct postings made immediately. With 4 or 5 bankings for each shop per week, this dramatically increases the speed and accuracy of the reconciliation process.

Centralised purchasing for cost control

The new goods subsidiary of Sue Ryder Care uses the Access Purchase Order Processing module. With in excess of 1,000 purchase invoices every month, strict budgetary controls are essential if Sue Ryder Care is to maintain its low administration costs. A purchasing consultant sources the cheapest supplies for the charity – everything from medical supplies and building maintenance to laundry services – and negotiates contract prices. A significant number of regional invoices are signed off, posted and paid centrally.

Expansion and System Upgrades

In 2002, three years after implementing Access, the central finance office decided to upgrade from Horizons to Dimensions. With their cost conscious attitude, it was determined that the upgrade to a SQL Server solution was justified. A SQL database was required because of the sheer volume of data being generated. Preparing comparative reports, on year-on-year activity, was taking too long. System back-ups were also becoming long-winded. Following the upgrade, reports that previously took hours to run were finished within seconds. Dimensions also introduced 4 additional analysis categories – bringing the total to 8. This meant that deeper analysis could be conducted in a much shorter timescale. Upgrading within the Access range meant that training costs were minimised, as users only had to learn the system’s new features and functionality. The underlying look and feel of the new system was no different to Horizons.

Consolidated reporting

On a monthly basis, management information from each of the 18 care centres and the 400+ shops is consolidated and summarised for the senior management team. Because of the increased scope and power of Dimensions, performance can now be analysed by group, division, region, area, type, expense code, location and property type. “With the eight categories of analysis Dimensions provides, we can rapidly pinpoint and report on discrete areas of activity. For example, we can see costs for palliative and neurological care as well as retail performance across each of our 8 geographic regions. This has improved our credibility and, as a charity, this is a significant boost for us.” Roger Cunningham concludes, “Access Accounts has enabled us to control our costs and to understand them. Improved management information enables us to make better decisions for the organisation, to improve our income and, ultimately, to provide a higher quality of care to our service users.”

Key Benefits

SQL Server database provides in-built safety precautions and facilitates much faster processing
Connection between Dimensions and Lloyds Link allows bank statements to enter straight into sales ledger which means errors in banking can be quickly identified and reconciled
Enables close control and understanding of costs
Quick and effective upgrade with minimal training costs due to same ‘look & feel’ of solutions

Improved management information enables us to make better decisions for the organisation, to improve our income and ultimately, to provide a higher quality of care to our service users.