The UK's first children's charity, Coram, is implementing an integrated finance and eProcurement solution from m-hance to improve the speed of management reporting, and ensure greater financial control.
The m-hance system will halve the time it takes Coram to complete its monthly bank reconciliation process and provide efficiency savings of up to £20,000 per year, by eliminating manual paper-based purchase-to-pay procedures, said the charity.
The system will go live next month. Coram, which was founded in 1739, sought an integrated solution to improve efficiency and provide more timely and accurate financial information for reporting purposes.
Coram needed to replace a proliferation of standalone systems which it said had become "restrictive and unproductive" as it expanded.
Velou Singara, chief finance officer of Coram Group, said: "The m-hance system will bring together key financial and budgetary information in a single framework to enable us to better control our costs and quickly extract complex data to create customised reports."
Singara said: "By reducing manual administration tasks we will be able to complete our monthly bank reconciliation process in two days instead of four, ensuring more time is devoted to analysing statistical trends which will assist us to better plan for the future.”
The new system will replace Coram’s standalone systems and automate a number of manual processes to reduce administration costs. The finance system’s integrated bank reconciliation module, Bank Management, uses rule-based matching functionality to automatically reconcile cash transactions to an imported bank statement, eliminating manually intensive processes and input errors.
The system’s advanced reporting functionality will also improve financial transparency by highlighting potential bank errors, unexpected charges or missing transactions to provide tighter financial control.
The eProcurement and spend analysis functionality from m-hance’s integrated Purchase Management offering will streamline Coram’s purchase-to-pay processes by replacing inefficient paper-based procedures.
Authorised staff will be able to easily submit and track the approval status of purchase invoices and requisitions, and confirm the receipt of goods ordered electronically in a single web-based system.
The system will also enable Coram to build hierarchies for approvals and to check against budgets, preventing "maverick spending" while providing enhanced visibility of purchasing commitments.