Member Article

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on song for new tax year with Exchequer

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) has selected Exchequer accounting software from Advanced Business Solutions to help control spend and improve its financial processes. CBSO, which performs around 130 concerts a year both nationally and internationally, will go live with the software in April.

CBSO chose Exchequer following a competitive tendering process involving four other software providers. The organisation’s migration to Exchequer will provide a more holistic system that will allow greater control of budgets, improve visibility and allow the finance team to focus their time on more value adding work.

The system will be used by the organisation’s four-strong finance team and for the first time also give its non-finance staff access to up to date financial data.

Exchequer, which was recommended to CBSO by other arts organisations (including The Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith), will remove the organisations’ reliance on spreadsheets, saving time on reconciliations and eliminating the scope for data entry error.

Annmarie Wallis, Director of Finance, CBSO says, “Having outgrown our existing finance system there was clear need for a more sophisticated alternative. We needed a cost effective product that was not only fit for purpose, but also able to offer the opportunity to enhance our business processes with user friendly functionality.

“We particularly liked Exchequer’s job costing solution because it will allow us to automatically manage all performance related costs whilst giving us the ability to view spend in real-time. This improved visibility will enable us to make informed decisions about our spending priorities, as and when we need to and means we will have better control and visibility of our financial performance across our entire programme of activities.

“We also liked the fact that the system appears easy to use with good reporting functionality, empowering non-financial staff to analyse and monitor their budgets. Overall, we will have a more holistic finance process, resulting in tighter financial control and better decision making across the organisation”.

Exchequer also offers the flexibility to integrate with other systems and CBSO’s finance team plans to integrate it with their existing Orchestra and diary management software and a new CRM system.

CBSO is the latest in a number of organisations working in the arts sector to choose Exchequer software to simplify and enhance their financial processes. Other customers include Edinburgh International Festival, The Rambert Dance Company, The National Youth Theatre and English Touring Opera, the Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts, in Dorset, and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Advanced .