Finance software helps charity to maintain year-on-year growth
Street League, a charity that helps young people facing socio-economic barriers find employment through the power of sport, has implemented financial management software from Advanced to efficiently process over 400,000 transactions annually and maintain its rapid growth levels.
Advanced's solution is enabling the charity to achieve annual cost savings of up to £18,000 by avoiding the need for further recruitment and maximising the productivity of its lean finance team, moreover, replacing its previous system has enabled Street League to enhance reporting and reduce its monthly management accounts process by one week.
Street League has grown at 30-40% year-on-year for the past five years, expanding from three regional teams in 2010 to 13 in 2015 and now have 32 academy teams in place across those regions. Turnover has also increased from £1.8m to £5.3m during the same period. The charity employs 120 staff throughout England and Scotland, targeting urban areas of cities with high rates of deprivation and youth unemployment. In the last financial year alone, Street League worked with over 2000 16-24 year-olds and will achieve over 1500 positive outcomes (work, training, education) during 2015/16.
Lesley Caron, Finance Director at Street League said: “Our previous system was creaking under the strain of having to cope with a huge increase in transaction volumes. We therefore needed to put the right accounting software in place to enable our small finance team of three to continue to produce accurate and timely information.”
“Advanced’s solution best met our requirements and has enabled us to undergo a complete finance transformation, providing us with powerful analysis in the format that we need it.”
The software was implemented in time for the start of the 2015/2016 financial year after the charity moved its finance headquarters from London to Manchester. Previously it took the finance team over half a day to manually upload complex payroll data; now they can upload the file into a bespoke journal which is then imported, taking less than an hour. Advanced's solution has also significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to complete the monthly management accounts process.
Furthermore, the software provides Street League with enhanced reporting capabilities, allowing them to produce detailed reports for each of the 13 regions which can in turn be broken down to team level. Operations managers can then access insightful data about how their region is performing and how their income is being used.
Caron comments, “The greater reporting functionality gives our regional operations managers the autonomy to understand and control their spending and financial performance, whilst providing us with more in-depth reports that we can use to make more informed and targeted decisions regarding funding.
“Moreover, the time savings that we have achieved with Advanced's solution will enable the charity to continue to grow without us having to incur costs from hiring additional finance staff, which enables us to help even more young people to develop the skills that they need to progress in life.”
Street League was the 2015 winner of the ‘Outstanding Team of the Year’ category in Advanced’s customer awards, the Advanced Halo Awards.
