WPI Group Ltd (WPI) has selected a portfolio of finance, document management, HR and payroll solutions from Advanced Exchequer (Advanced) to support its growth strategy. The systems will significantly reduce month-end financial processing and provide real-time visibility of projects and financial reports via the Exchequer365 integrated mobile app. The solutions will go live in November 2015.
WPI provides a wide range of civil engineering, surfacing and property development services to the UK construction industry. The Cheshire-based company’s accelerated growth has placed a strain on its existing outdated financial management system.
The Group will significantly improve the accessibility and accuracy of information to more closely monitor costs throughout the duration of each project. The business’s senior managers will be able to view financial data and reports in real-time (committed costs, payments and tax reports etc) and authorise documents 24/7 via the eXchequer365 mobile app.
Andy Hoose, Financial Director at WPI Group Ltd, says: “Our existing system is unreliable and takes weeks to produce the costing information that we need here and now. This is becoming impossible to manage as the business continues to grow.
“Of the three systems we considered, Exchequer had the clear edge because it is a fully integrated solution which will give us increased financial transparency and control. The Exchequer 365 mobile app, together with the document management system are also seen as vital requirements to increase efficiency throughout the business.”
In addition, Exchequer’s Construction Industry Scheme module will enable WPI to comply with HMRC tax legislation and keep track of payments made to each sub-contractor it employs.
The document management solution, which uses optical character recognition technology, will replace error prone and inefficient data entry processes to streamline the authorisation of purchase orders and 25,000 supplier invoices each year. All scanned financial documents will be automatically linked together and stored in a secure electronic archive. In the future, WPI plans to store non-financial documents including health and safety certificates and employee contracts, further cutting paper.
Finally, the HR and payroll functionality will maintain and process HR and payroll information for approximately 250 full-time and part-time employees, eliminating the need to manually extract and consolidate data from multiple systems into Excel spreadsheets.
Hoose comments: “With real time processing we will significantly reduce our month-end reporting process . Senior managers now have the flexibility to stay fully informed about the business’s performance from anywhere via the mobile solution, and by gaining instant visibility of committed costs will assist them to make better informed decisions and ensure we maximise profitability on each project.
“We also envisage further efficiency savings from Exchequer’s integrated payroll and document management solution through eliminating unnecessary duplication of effort and large volumes of paper documents.”