Mears Group
Accountis Case Study: Mears Group
Bacsactive-IP consolidates data and improves visibility across multiple sites
Mears is a leading social housing repairs and maintenance provider in the UK and has a growing presence in the domiciliary care market. Mears’ business is focused on the social housing and community sector, where they bring the highest standards of care to people, their homes and their communities. More than 8000 people work for Mears, delivering in excess of 3,000 repairs every day, to a portfolio of over 500,000 houses nationwide and providing over 4,500,000 hours of care per annum, to 50 local authorities and Primary Care trusts. Mears is an ambitious company with a powerful vision, operating in a growing market. Due to rapid expansion through organic growth and a series of acquisitions, Mears has found itself operating multiple disparate finance systems. In late 2008, Mears decided to look for a new Bacstel-IP service provider who could help them unify their payment systems and streamline processes.
Bacsactive-IP’s Winning Workflow Module
Mears researched the market and decided upon Bacsactive-IP Enterprise with Workflow and Account Validate. Ben Westran, Group Financial Controller at Mears explains how he made the decision; “There are a number of important reasons why we chose Bacsactive-IP. Primarily we wanted a web-based service that could be used company-wide and across multiple sites. We were impressed with the innovative technology and their vision gelled with our own. Bacsactive-IP provided us with a centralised system that could be accessed remotely from any location. However it was the Workflow Module that really made Bacsactive-IP stand out. It enabled us to implement improved controls and improve the visibility of the whole Bacs process, giving us the freedom to automate functions, eliminate errors and save time.”
Consolidation and Automation
Mears submit many critical business payments to Bacs on a daily basis including payroll, subcontractor and large supplier payments. Data for these submissions is generated by multiple finance systems including Pyramid HR, Sage, Pegasus and SunSystems. Before Bacsactive-IP, each submission file had to be created manually and then checked by a number of people across the organisation before being sent. This process was slow and manually intensive with poor visibility of the end-to-end process for the Financial Controller. Mears wanted to reduce manual input and make the process faster and more efficient – the Workflow module enabled them to do this. The Bacsactive-IP Workflow Module is a powerful, flexible system which enables the complete automation of Bacs submissions, report retrieval and distribution. It can be easily customised to match internal business processes for a bespoke solution. For example, a number of files can be automatically processed, each following its own individual workflow and configured to meet specific business requirements.
“Using Workflow, Mears integrated Bacsactive-IP with their multiple finance systems to pick up new payment files and automatically create submissions. Authorised users at various stages of the approval process were notified by email that a new file was available for processing. They could then login to Bacsactive-IP via Internet Explorer to view, seal, sign and send files to Bacs. This entire process can be accessed online from any location, giving the Financial Controller improved visibility,” said Ifor Williams, Sales Director at Accountis.
Account Validate – Overnight data checking
For further automation Mears also used the Account Validate module. This module quickly eliminates errors when preparing payment data by checking bank account details with the latest industry databases. Account Validate was set-up to check Mears account databases automatically overnight so that any errors were highlighted each morning. This process saves valuable time as it reduces the likelihood of files being rejected by Bacs and slowing down the submission process.
Quick and Smooth Implementation
As with any busy organisation, Mears wanted an expedient and hassle-free implementation. The Accountis development team worked quickly with Mears to integrate Bacsactive-IP seamlessly with their back-end systems. This was followed with custom integration with the Workflow module and a staff training session. Soon the Mears finance team were up and running with their new web-based Bacsactive-IP system. “With Bacsactive-IP we have been able to consolidate payment data from multiple sources, so that it can be controlled centrally and accessed from multiple locations. I now have improved visibility of an efficient process that’s much quicker.”
“Mears is a technically innovative organisation and we have enjoyed working with Accountis. Their flexible technology means that there is plenty of opportunity for further development to further enhance and streamline our payments process” concludes Ben.
Key Benefits for Mears:
With Bacsactive-IP Enterprise, Workflow and Account Validate Modules:
- A fully automated submissions process
- Ease of integration with third party applications
- No change to existing systems
- Consolidation of data from multiple systems
- One-view of all transactions
- Web access from multiple locations
- Overnight data validation to eliminate errors
- Approval workflow with email notifications
