Avante Care & Support, a charity and leading provider of specialist dementia care, has chosen MRI Software’s (MRI) software to establish greater control over its asset base that includes properties, vehicles and furniture within its care homes. It wanted increased visibility of the status of items and equipment with the ability to produce reports to support the year-end process. The company required integration with its accounting software, Exchequer – which MRI’s system offers.
Any questions that we have asked throughout the process have been answered without exception.
Avante Care & Support is a not-for-profit organisation with a workforce that is equipped with the experience and commitment required to provide exceptional services to individuals and families that are in need of support. Its care homes provide assistance for people across South East London and Kent, many of whom are affected by dementia. It aims to introduce a positive new stage into the lives of its residents whilst also providing high levels of personalised care.
The integration between MRI’s fixed asset module and Exchequer’s accounting software was a deciding factor for the company. Nigel Mitchell, Finance Manager at Avante Care & Support states, “We specifically needed a product that worked alongside our financial system. We wanted to ensure the two systems could work together in order to avoid any data duplication. We will also benefit greatly from the ability to produce depreciation and disposal journals that post directly to Exchequer.”
Before moving over to the software, the company was using a number of spreadsheets to record asset details. Nigel comments, “We used Excel™ in various different formats that were dependent on the category being recorded. This led to difficulties in communicating data across classes. We treat Freehold Properties differently to Motor Vehicles, for example. MRI’s system and its ability to cater for a variety of different categories and accounting treatments will prove extremely useful by introducing a consistent approach to all assets and ensuring that communication across departments is straightforward.
“Something that appealed to us greatly in the software was the integration with Exchequer. It will help us avoid duplicating details across systems,” Nigel declares. “The tool will allow us to impose more control and save us time by allowing us to import and export data by our Category and/or Location analysis codes. We can now automate a lot of processes within the company, such as depreciation calculations, month-end reports and the posting of journals. This will give our finance team a lot more time to focus on other pressing tasks and ensure that all information is completely accurate and delivered in a concise and timely manner.
“The capital project control element of the software will also prove beneficial for us as we have a number of projects in progress at all times,” Nigel continues. “Being able to track those individual costs better and collate them together when they are complete is extremely convenient and further improves the level of control over the status of our assets at all times.
“Thus far, we have enjoyed a very good relationship with MRI,” Nigel concluded. “Any questions that we have asked throughout the process have been answered without exception.”
