Success stories: The Access Foundation

Background

The Access Foundation was set up in 2021 in the UK following the success and growth enjoyed by The Access Group. They are focused on making a real difference to people’s lives by awarding grants to charities which make a valuable and measurable positive impact.

The Access Foundation is responsible for managing and accurately reporting for over 100 charity grants annually, all of which are meticulously handled using our industry-leading cloud-based accounting solution, Access Financials.

The main challenge for The Access Foundation

Rob Parkinson, Trustee at The Access Foundation, describes the foundation's activities as complex and spread across multiple organisations, countries, and currencies:

Annually, we give out over 2 million worth of grants but they're spread across 150 or so grants in the year. And that's spread around 10 countries in the world, across 8-9 different currencies. There's quite a lot to keep track of at that point.

According to Rob Parkinson, these grants are split into 3 different categories they need to track separately: 'We have three guiding pillars within the foundation, which are the "Digital Divide" and then what we call "Charity of the Year" and "Staff Sponsored Charities".'

As the organisation took off in terms of growth, their previous system was no longer meeting their advanced accounting needs: "To start off, we used Excel and that's because we didn't really know the structure of our chart of accounts and what we wanted our P&L and balance sheet to look like at the beginning. So, we started off in Excel, where obviously you can do anything, you like, which is good and bad. After we'd been trading for a year and a bit, we then had a pretty set idea of how wanted to report our numbers and how we could have a structure that also suited us at that point in time, and then also allowed us to scale up."

Rob continues, "I personally think that it's useful to want to know the structure of what you want to implement in the finance package before jumping in; you need a bit of structure first."

The impact of Access Financials on The Access Foundation's success

"We're in our actual third year of the foundation being in existence but it's the first year we've used Access Financials."

"It took maybe a month to set up, which was everything really from having our initial conversations through to getting onboarded on the platform and then starting to bring in our open items and move into our first month of trading."

"Before, we just recorded our transactions in Excel but from a scalability point of view, it's not it's not a way to be able to scale."

"In our first year and a half, we didn't from the number of grants we did."

"It wasn't that many but now we're scaling up and we're doing you know more than 100 grants a year, we need a proper Finance package."

What makes Access Financials the right financial management software 

"I would say they [Access] have got the right software for the not-for-profit sector if you want to track your committed costs and your actual costs, if you want to track your restricted and unrestricted budgets."

"In the charity sector, the uniqueness compared to the commercial sector is the restricted and unrestricted funds. If we're giving donor money, some of that donor money is restricted and can only be used for certain projects. The rest of that donor money is unrestricted, and we can use it for any project. We need to track all donor money coming in to know whether it's restricted or unrestricted, and then when we're spending it to also track it as restricted or unrestricted."

"Our favorite bit of functionality would be the project costing side of Access Financials and how we can use that to track each individual grant we give, knowing whether it's restricted or unrestricted, and tracking the committed costs of that."

Each week, each month, we automatically extract that into Access Office integration and review that information in pivot tables, which allows us to present it to trustees in a way that's really easy for them to consume. If we didn't have the software, we would struggle to function just as a charity. We would struggle to keep track of our committed and actual spend and our budget in the month and budget in the year without the software.

"Data entry and having a single source of the truth is kind of what's key to us. From the beginning of that process, when we give a grant out, we know how much we have given and how much we committed to. Right from that point all the way through to the invoice coming in, us paying the invoice and it is going through into the general ledger, that's another key aspect there."

"Working with Access has been really nice for us and was great from the outset. I remember the onboarding meeting I had with um the Access employee. She took me through the onboarding process into Workspace, where you can set up your key users. From that point, you can then grant them rights to use certain applications. We use the Financials product as well as the learning product for some safeguarding training that all members of the foundation have to do each year."

"We have the Charity Commission, where every charity has to upload their audited accounts each year. The key thing to avoid is having your accounts qualified because no charity wants to have their accounts on the Charity Commissions as qualified accounts. Using an application where you are confident in the numbers and, therefore, when they get audited and put on the Charity Commission site, that you're confident in them is key to the whole sector."