Aquarium improves business performance for financial services company
Published January 10th, 2009
Brunel Franklin were faced with the problem of having to issue hundreds of invoices per month. Being a labour intensive process and prone to human error, problems were starting to mount up. Hazel Rees, Brunel Franklin’s finance director explains: “We were having real issues just to get the invoices out of the door; making sure all invoice details were correct and chasing the debtors was becoming a nightmare and was wasting valuable resource. We needed to find a better solution.”
It was then that Brunel Franklin approached Aquarium’s consultancy team for advice. Aquarium proposed a number of process changes to their Aquarium deployment and also a full integration with Sage Line 50. The issuing of client invoices was totally automated following the sending of the “win letter” from Aquarium. Each evening the day’s wins were passed seamlessly to Sage and opened up on the debtors ledger. A bulk print of the day’s invoices was also sent to the printer for dispatch by post. Then, as the monies arrived in, Sage would pass back to Aquarium the payments made and close cases down in Aquarium where the balances were fully paid up. In some instances it was necessary to issue win cheques to clients; again this process, including the printing of the cheques was fully managed in Aquarium.
The Aquarium consultancy team also implemented a fully automated debt collection process – escalating from SMS reminders for payment, to warning letters and emails, to collation of daily late debtors lists for chase by phone. The results have been impressive as Hazel Rees concludes:
“The difference was spectacular. We have removed a large amount of overhead from the finance function whilst dramatically improving our ability to collect money owed to us. In the first three weeks of having this in place we more than recovered the investment in deploying Aquarium’s Sage interface. I wish we had done it years ago.”
AquariumClaims is designed to be quick to set up and is available at a comparatively lower cost. It uses the latest web-based technology giving users a powerful solution at a cost that traditional software providers cannot match. For further information contact Aquarium Software, free of charge, on 0800 781 7570 or visit http://www.aquariumclaims.com
