Assura Group

Background

In 2008, IRIS Financials helped healthcare services supplier Assura Group to bring together the finances of its three main business divisions. The new system has supported the company through a period of rapid business growth and improved the way it manages the information.

Today Assura Group is a leading UK healthcare Real Estate Investment Trust and works in partnership with GPs and other healthcare professionals to provide primary care property services. The Group has 300 property sites.

The Group was using different financial software packages within its main business divisions and its central financial ledger, including Pastel, Sage and Manhattan. These systems didn’t interface with each other, had reached the limits of their functionality and were not very user-friendly. Assura Group needed a new system that all divisions could use and which could interface with other business systems. They chose IRIS Financials over a number of other providers.

The Issues

Assura Group wanted a system that was flexible enough to adapt to the company’s continued rapid growth. Since IRIS Financials was installed, the Group has been restructured and created a number of additional companies. IRIS Financials has easily handled this expansion with its analysis flexibility, unlimited views and inbuilt consolidation.

The Solution

IRIS Financials has transformed the way that financial information is managed and analysed. The Group now has a total of 30 users of the system, all based within the finance department. The core ledger system provides key management reporting across the Group and makes it easy to access key data. The accounts by company have been optimised across over 90 companies and users can drill through the data if they need more information.

Previously, data was manipulated manually through spreadsheets to produce management information, which made it difficult to provide timely, reliable, accurate and consistent reports. Now, consolidations are carried out on a monthly basis, and the Vision reporting tool provides users with far more options for working with data. Vision allows users to access the IRIS Financials database through Excel. This means the Group’s accountants can pull data straight out of the database and carry on using Excel at the same time.

IRIS Financials also integrates with the Group’s Document Management System, providing users with a visual detail of each invoice or any other relevant document attached to the transaction or analysis account.

The Benefits

Because the Group operates in a range of different sectors, it would have proved very difficult and costly to source one IT system which could handle all of its different operational requirements. IRIS Financials provides the core financial ledgers, purchasing and reporting but also interfaces easily with the other systems in place, such as EPOS, property management and stock control.

New property management software was installed at the same time as IRIS Financials. Previously, transactional details were recorded in Manhattan and then re-keyed manually into Pastel. The new Landmark property management system allows these transactions to be processed electronically and for information to be transferred automatically between the two systems. Assura Group raises all rent invoices on Landmark and they are posted across to IRIS Financials; service charge supplier invoices
posted in IRIS Financials also go across to Landmark.

The Future

With the financial management system now fully embedded across its companies, Assura Group are implementing ideas for developing IRIS Financials further, including accessing the comprehensive reports the Group has through the internet using MS Reporting Services.

If you’d like to see how IRIS Financials can help your business, contact us today.