The Institute of Asset Management
MIGRATION
The Institute of Asset Management (IAM) is the international professional body for asset management professionals.
IAM develops asset management knowledge and best practice and generates awareness of the benefits of the asset management discipline for the individual, organisations and wider society.
Established in 1994, IAM currently has over 2000 Individual and 300 Corporate Members and a network of over 30,000 people globally.
Pain Points before BookCheck X
• The Sage system required a lot of manual intervention
• The linking CRM system created many duplicate sales invoices and payments
• Lots of unpicking was required to reconcile accounts
• Worldpay payments were very difficult to reconcile between two separate businesses
• In short and a very inefficient and expensive to run accounting system
It became apparent that there were efficiencies and time savings to be made with the current set up and processes. These included duplications of sales invoices pushed through to Sage by IAM’s CRM system. Not only were sales invoices being duplicated, but also some of the payments from customers. This made for a very time consuming reconciliation process whereby each customer account needed to be reviewed individually.
Payments received from Worldpay were the main problem. IAM is made up of two separate businesses, but all payments used one Worldpay gateway. Therefore, payments into Worldpay had to be separated out between the two businesses. This is not so difficult but still laborious, however then add in additional currencies, USD, EUR, CAD and GBP and things started to get very messy.
Solutions with BookCheck X
BookCheck X was engaged to migrate IAM from Sage to Xero to create opportunities to make processes more efficient and save the client a lot of time and money. The initial steps were;
• Migrate both IAM companies to Xero from Sage, including full reconciliation back to source data
• Work with IAM staff and their CRM provider to create a process for the integration of their sales data with Xero
• Look into the process for the Worldpay reconciliations
BookCheck X handled the complete migration and set up of Xero, with the complication of multiple currencies, including a training session with IAM staff to ensure that they were comfortable with how to access data. Bank feeds were set up to enable reconciliations to be done more frequently rather than waiting for monthly statements.
Working with IAM and their CRM provider to simplify the sales invoicing process was the next challenge. We were able to create a method for the data to be imported on a weekly basis from CRM to Xero. This included marking invoices as paid where appropriate to ease the reconciliation process. The historic horrible issue of duplications was eliminated – this alone saved a serious amount of cost.
Finally, BookCheck X looked at the Worldpay reconciliations. A power query tool was used in Excel to build a model to separate out the transactions relating to the two different companies and the different currencies. This meant that data could be imported into Xero easily and efficiently, including all intercompany transactions.
Overall the ongoing time savings for this client have been in the region of 30% - a massive reduction in time and money, just by switching from Sage to Xero and adding in some automation.
What’s next?
Worldpay have recently updated their portal and so we hope to be able to further streamline the import of payments into Xero.
We are also working with IAM to restructure their chart of accounts in Xero across both companies, in order to generate more meaningful reporting.
