Children's charity centralises finance IT

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NCH, the UK children's charity, has standardised its budgeting and financial planning systems using new accounting software to eliminate disparate, spreadsheet-based procedures.

The charity, which is a voluntary provider of children's centres, children's services in rural areas, services for disabled children and their families and services for young people leaving care, found itself battling a proliferation of difficult-to-manage spreadsheets for budgeting, reporting and financial planning.

As a result, it has chosen to implement Cognos' TM1 product to consolidate more than 2,000 Excel spreadsheets and pull key financial data into one centralised database holding the charity's budgeting and financial planning data.

Mark Geagan, project manager at NCH said the spreadsheet-based procedures prior to using the new financial system, from Cognos' subsidiary Applix, was too time-consuming for the charity.

"With TM1, NCH will be able to do essential revisions quickly and efficiently, becoming far more cost effective in both the short and long-term", he said.

He added that the ability to create models to suit the specifics needs of the organisation will allow NCH to continue developing the system in future, specifically in the area of performance management, as well as more general reporting with the help of TM1's dashboard capability.

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