FESPA

The challenge

Eliminating manual calculations and data entry

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Way too much of the FESPA finance team’s time was taken up rekeying data, maintaining spreadsheets and working things out manually. “We were on Sage 200 and in my first interview for this role, we talked about the fact that it wasn’t meeting FESPA’s needs,” says Andy Froud, Finance and Commercial Controller. “I’d used it in my previous job and it was a good system for that company but not for FESPA.”

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The association operates around the world, with staff in Mexico, the UAE, China, Thailand and Turkey. Accounting and invoicing happen in euros but the old finance system was set up in sterling. The team had to look up exchange rates and convert sums manually – so two people working from the same data could produce different figures.

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Duplication was rife, with the Salesforce CRM system generating sales invoices whose details had to be typed into Sage. The arrangement left plenty of scope for errors. Purchase orders and expenses claims bounced back and forth between budget holders and the finance team by email.

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With no way of seeing real-time data in the finance system, departments were tempted to keep their own spreadsheets, whose contents didn’t necessarily tally with what was in Sage.

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The solution

Automation has streamlined work and transformed reporting

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FESPA looked into three finance systems, asking the vendors a list of questions – and found iplicit could do more than the others.

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• Live currency feed. iplicit's live foreign exchange feed was a big factor. It means the figures in the system always reflect relevant currency values, with no calculations to be done manually and no risk of two people having contradictory information.

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• Expenses automation. The ability to automate expenses workflows was another attraction. Each FESPA event results in a lot of expense claims. Previously, finance produced a list of what had been spent and users supplied receipts along with some detail of the spend. Now, everything is submitted via iplicit and approvals are handled online, then automatically posted to the ledgers.

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• Secure purchasing. The system for purchases has also been improved, with no need to forward invoices for approval. Instead, spending is based on purchase orders. “People commit up-front to their spend – so when an invoice comes in, iplicit reads it with the aid of optical character recognition (OCR) and matches it to the purchase order,” says Andy.

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• Visible budget information. The system shows what a department’s committed spend is and what’s been spent so far. Budget holders can easily see this information, wherever they are. “In the past, the finance team would spend a lot of time doing a spreadsheet to send to a budget holder – and of course, it was instantly out of date. Now, we have a single source of truth,” says Andy.

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• Project accounting. iplicit's project accounting features have transformed the team’s ability to analyse performance, allowing the many different elements of an event to be set up as distinct projects. The main European show, for example, is set up as 10 sub-projects. All spending and revenue are allocated to a project and a department.

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The team keeps its knowledge up to date by attending iplicit customer webinars. “The webinars are excellent,” says Andy. “There are always two or three moments where I say, ‘That’s brilliant, I must implement it’.”

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The outcome

The team is saving 5-10% of its time and doing higher-value work

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Thanks to less data entry and simpler workflows, FESPA is seeing substantial time savings. “We’re not a big team – there are only four of us – and I’d say we’ve saved between 1-2 days a month by moving to iplicit, or around 5-10% of our time,” says Andy.  

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That has meant regaining time for work that’s not only higher value but more rewarding. “It’s not exciting for the team if they’re just processing and copying data,” says Andy. “I want them to do more interesting things which will help them develop in their careers. We’re definitely spending more time looking at the numbers and understanding them now than we ever did before.”