FISCAL Case Studies.

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London & Quadrant: Case Study

With a small Accounts Payable team, London & Quadrant recognised they had no time to waste when it came to processing invoices or chasing duplicate payments. Since launch, FISCAL’s solutions have reduced duplicated payments by 96%, transformed their AP processes and empowered the AP team.

Introduction

Established in 1963, London & Quadrant (L&Q) is one of the largest of 2000 housing associations in the UK, managing over 70,000 homes with a market value of £10.8bn. It operates in a volatile housing market in London and the Southeast, plagued by chronic undersupply, huge demand, inflation of house prices and overcrowding. The group’s overall financial strategy is to plow every pound of surplus back into providing high quality homes and services for their residents and fund community projects to help low income families and key workers.

London and Quadrant saw a 96% reduction in duplicate payments.
Details

The AP department consists of six people and processes 83,000 invoices a year. L&Q has several thousands of suppliers on their master supplier file, with around 4,500 active suppliers at any one time. In 2006 they migrated to a new accounting system, which caused huge disruption to their payments. Many duplicate payments were found as a result of the transfer, and the workflow process relied on time-stretched AP staff to catch them. External auditors were engaged to recover the erroneous payments, but L&Q knew they needed to address the underlying issues.

Solution

When FISCAL approached the then Group Financial Controller for a meeting, he invited them in for discussions and submitted two financial years’ worth of data as part of the Proof of Concept exercise. FISCAL’s solution immediately uncovered duplicate payments which more than covered the cost of the software, and which hadn’t been detected by auditors. Head of Financial Operations Sarah White took on the direct responsibility for the software, seeing it as an ideal tool to help her and her team obtain insight into payment issues and stop subsequent duplicate payments from happening. With the software suite fully implemented, the AP Transactions function is now run on a strict, preventative basis ever since, identifying potential duplicate payments prior to the weekly payment run. The department also uses the Master Supplier File module on a monthly basis to identify potential duplicate records and act as a check when entering new accounts. Now, the AP team plays a significant role in maximising the surplus funds available for L&Q’s initiatives.

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