College needed better accounting system following rapid
expansion
Cambridge Regional College (CRC) is integrating its financial
system with its student applications to save staff time and reduce
costs.
With an annual turnover of £28m, the further education college has
almost doubled in size over the past five years and needed to
upgrade its financial system to cope with the expansion. It is
using financial software from business software supplier Symmetry
to replace its existing Sage core finance system.
Symmetry Financials is an integrated financial and management
accounting program aimed at organisations with a turnover of up to
£30m and between two and 800 users.
It includes general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable,
commitment accounting with purchasing and funds control, assets and
information management, real-time reporting, secure e-procurement,
and comprehensive systems integration.
Chris Lang, finance director at CRC, said, "We were looking for a
solution that would enable us to streamline the finance function,
integrate with our other student applications and help devolve
accounting tasks to our 80 departmental users.
"We knew that selecting the right partner would be difficult, and
we felt that the most important part of the process would be to
collect and analyse as much user feedback as possible.
"Symmetry provided consistently positive user endorsements from
other further education colleges."
Symmetry Financials was able to provide integration with the
college's student and payroll systems, real-time reporting via a
web browser interface, electronic purchasing and purchase approval,
and self-service accounting for non-finance users.
The procurement phase of the project started in November 2004 and
finished in March 2005. The implementation project started in April
and is due to go live in August.
