Royal College of Emergency Medicine
Automating prepayments, deferred income and partial VAT saves many hours of manual work each month
Charity has been able to handle growth without extra staff
Finance team has gone from data entry to analysis and planning
The challenge
Rapid growth exposed the limits of a system built for smaller organisations
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine was working with a system that couldn’t keep up with its growth. With hundreds of transactions to be handled every month, plus manual processes for prepayments and deferred income, the system was requiring ever more staff time. “We were using Sage 50. When I started, we were a small organisation so it wasn’t too bad, but as we grew we realised we needed to get away from all this manual inputting,” says Sandra San Martin, the charity’s Management Accountant.
Partial VAT was worked out manually, leaving plenty of scope for mistakes during data entry or calculations. A disjointed approval process involved uploading invoices to a document management platform, then exporting a “massive” file of approved invoices for inputting into Sage. With 135 cost centres to account for, the system wasn’t sustainable.
“We always managed to meet deadlines because I have an amazing team – but it was very time consuming,” says Sandra. “I used to do management accounts in an Excel spreadsheet with a lot of lovely formulas – but if one formula broke, the whole thing became a mess and it took a lot of time to find where it needed correcting.”
The solution
Streamlined processes, greater accuracy and happier managers
The move to iplicit quickly cut many hours from routine processes and improved accuracy, while giving managers better access to information.
• Automation for complex tasks: The team no longer has to maintain manual journals for complex, error-prone tasks like prepayments and deferred income. iplicit’s ability to handle partial VAT has also lightened the burden and reduced the scope for mistakes.
• Unified system for approvals and reports: The college has benefited from having approvals and management accounts in the same system – so managers can log in to approve invoices and see their up-to-date financial position.
• Accounts payable automation: There’s no longer any need to export invoices from a document management system and key them into the finance software. iplicit’s AP automation gets invoices into the system automatically and matches them with supplier records.
• Live exchange rate feed: The college has examiners from overseas submitting claims in other currencies. The team uses iplicit’s live FX feed to easily convert these transactions into the base currency.
• Easy cash flow analysis: The team can now see the organisation’s cash position in seconds. “iplicit set up a cash flow query for us, so I click ‘refresh’ and it’s there,” says Sandra.
• Fewer queries at audit: At the first audit with iplicit, the auditors were given their own read-only access to the system. If they had a query about a transaction, they could inspect the supporting documents in the system, reducing the number of queries they had to raise with the team.
The team felt well supported in the transition from Sage 50 and has regular updates from iplicit’s customer success team. “Every time we raise a support ticket these days, it gets looked at immediately,” says Sandra.
The move has given both the finance team and non-finance managers instant access to data. Kwame Brantuo-Boateng, Head of Finance, says: "iplicit has done some tremendous work for us in terms of visibility. Sandra doesn't have to send out management reports in Excel spreadsheets any more. It will just be in the system, so managers can see their income and expenditure. The budgeting and the forecasting are both good too.”
The outcome
Work has shifted from data entry to real analysis
iplicit has enabled the growing charity to accommodate extra work without adding more staff to its finance team. The system has also helped shift the team’s work away from bookkeeping tasks towards financial analysis. “We have time to actually dive into the figures. As I often say to my team, we're not data entry people. The system should be doing all that for us. We’re accountants. We need to review what's happening in the system,” says Sandra.
"I can dive into the figures now and really understand what has happened, what is happening and what could happen. I can then give a better commentary to Kwame so that he can put together a clearer view of what's coming in the future.”
New features added in 2026 – including iplicit’s own AI-powered tools – are set to build on that ability to analyse and predict. "I can see iplicit’s appetite for more innovation in the system,” says Kwame. “I know there are many systems out there, which is good, but I can see iplicit is really matching up to the big ones. And I can see the desire to listen to the customers and to take customer feedback and add it into the system as things change,” he says.
"We hope to work with iplicit into the future as it continues to improve the system. It is a win-win situation for us."
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