Sapientia Education Trust

The Sapientia Education Trust (SET) was established in 2016 with the purpose of bringing like-minded schools together and work in partnership to deliver a world class education to pupils in Norfolk and Suffolk. SET includes over 5,500 pupils, employs 1,300 staff and operates in 16 schools.

Previously using Sage 200c for Education, SET recognised the need to switch to a powerful cloud accounting solution to support growth and efficiencies in their business as they were encountering key challenges in their growth journey.

OBJECTIVES

The key challenges for SET in using the Sage 200c for Education solution is that it did not allow for easy consolidated accounts or inter company reporting due to the nature of the system, something that they needed as a core and automated feature of the new system. Another limitation was the many tasks completed outside of the finance system including reporting for VAT and purchasing workflow stages, features that needed to be brought into the new system to improve efficiencies and digitalise processes.

SET also wanted to move to a full-scale cloud technology to remove their on-premise IT costs and adopt a best-in-class cloud accountancy system to support their growth.

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SAPIENTIA + SAGE INTACCT

Sapientia Education Trust (SET) now has a solution in place with Sage Intacct, where adding new schools now takes minutes instead of a 1 day process that they were unable to do themselves and had to engage Sage to perform. This has also removed the professional services cost starting from £1,000 per new school to do so.

Consolidation of entities is now an automated process via Sage Intacct, providing insightful financial reporting, which has significantly reduced the manual effort required to achieve month end close in comparison to their previous solution.

The Sage Intacct flexible purchasing workflow with comprehensive approval policies that can be used at every stage of the purchasing cycle has prevented overspend and reduced the risk of processing errors which has incurred cost savings for Sapientia Education Trust (SET).

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WHAT SAPIENTIA SAID...

“Sapientia Education Trust received a strong and consistent delivery from ION for our Sage Intacct solution. We worked with a knowledgeable and communicative team at ION with their Product Specialists and Project Managers.

"The Solution provided us with tangible benefits to our business which included a vast improvement in our supplier payment performance, which improved by 33% from our previous system.The Financial Reports produced from this solution are among the best we have seen and are of excellent quality, we now produce our board report at the click of a button.

We were engaged and valued at each stage of the project delivery and have a product which meets our needs and requirements, and crucially it was delivered on time. I would happily provide references to other clients thinking of working with ION for solutions such as this"
Steven Dewing, CFO, Sapientia Education Trust

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