Antur Teifi

Antur Teifi is a local enterprise company with headquarters in Newcastle Emlyn, West Wales.

It employs forty staff across four locations and had a turnover for financial year end March 1996 of £1.3 million. It was founded in 1979 to strengthen and improve the economic and social infrastructure of the Teifi Valley and encourage a range of entrepreneurial activity in response to the local unemployment problem.

Antur Teifi is funded partly by grants, including European Social Fund and European Regional Development, as well as by the local Private Sector. However, it has been able to achieve operating surplus through its own income generating activities and business initiatives. All financial surplus is put back into helping the business community. For example in the provision of free of charge Diagnostic Counselling and heavily subsidised Executive Assistance in key business areas such as marketing, planning, quality assurance, information systems and personnel.
In 1996 Antur Teifi decided to re-evaluate its accounting system and chose Access Accounts as its preferred solution.

Antur Teifi first embraced computerised accounting in 1990 when it operated on a standalone DOS system running Sage. Two years later, the company progressed to a multi-user system to avoid a growing bottleneck at data entry.
In 1996, Antur Teifi decided to re-evaluate its accounting system again. The primary decision factor was the need to overcome needless complexity in obtaining income and expenditure reports on a quarterly basis. A second factor was price of software and implementation. Customer support became another decision factor due to fading back up service from its existing supplier, which led to a decline in user confidence.

Selection of the replacement software was made by financial director Mr Cris Tomos, IT manager Mr Clive Davies and with the involvement of managing director Mr Wynfford James. They researched the market by contacting similar sized businesses to request opinions and recommendations. The decision to shortlist Access Accounts followed a recommendation by Lampeter-based company Therapeutic Antibodies, which had recently conducted its own evaluation and procurement of IT systems.

Requirements

The company operates a project-led business model, where sales and expense tracking are essential. Sales revenue is generated through recharging for services from a portfolio of commercial activities. These include lease and rental of workshop and office units in Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthen, Lampeter and Cardigan; conference and information technology facilities hire at the Telematic Centre at Aberarad; professional training via Trac, itself a joint venture with Menter a Busnes; and retailing local craft, artistic and food products in collaboration with local producers. Therefore, accurate overhead recovery, a third of which are staff salaries, prove especially important in terms of project costing.

After shortlisting from five potential vendors, Antur Teifi awarded the contract to the Access Accounts software solutions. According to Tomos, Access Accounting was selected based on outstanding customer service and value for money.
Antur Teifi had fallen behind in a procurement timetable which meant that there were less than four months before the intention to go live on 1 April 1996.
In terms of system set up, the Nominal Ledger coding structure proved important as the chart of Nominal Accounts had to mirror the costing code structure. Two thousand Nominal Codes were imported from its old system and reorganised to formulate a new nine digit, three tier coding structure which enabled reporting by any combination of department or sector and by company.

Antur Teifi had already invested £50,000 on infrastructure, hardware and a Novell network. Sufficient hardware specification meant no additional expense other than the capital cost of the software and training, which was £8,000. Implementation was smooth with the Access Accounting Reseller delivering three days consultancy and three days training on-site. Two further days were spent off-site in dataporting and testing. Cheques could not be sent out during a two week interruption period due to the financial year end. Antur Teifi went live with Access Accounts on 15 April. The system was expanded to five concurrent users within the first week. Only one problem was encountered when extra users were being brought online due to software unlock codes but this was successfully remedied by the suppliers. Users at remote sites, linked to Aberarad via ISDN, were able to obtain access to make enquiries on the data within the first month

Implementation of the Access Accounts package has provided the company with “far better management information” according to financial director, Cris Tomos. Every departmental manager gets a two page mini P&L report monthly which enables them to see the income and expenditure attributed to every project. “The last system was not very user friendly whereas now we can see the details of every transaction,” said IT manager Clive Davies. He said: “through the search, sorting and subtotalling capabilities within the software it is possible to report by department, sector or company.”
Executive reporting is handled easily with Excel which has improved reporting and analysis.

Accounting procedures including recurring journals for depreciation, internal income and expenditure balances, allocation and quarterly reconciliation of grant income are handled personally by the financial director, Tomos, from his own computer desktop.
All users in all departments are happier using the Access Accounts system, whether entering transactions or making enquiries