Success Story
Southend-on-Sea Borough Council
We sat down with Andrew Walker, Finance Manager, Financial Planning & Control Department to discuss our recent implementation of Unit4 Income Manager and our Agent Referred Payments system.
Here’s the background of the implementation process as told by Andrew.
Blueplanet understood our requirements as a council and of our customers. It was essential that they were able to communicate to me in my language. The Blueplanet team not only gave me a great understanding of the product and how it works, but also a greater understanding of how we can draw insights from our own data and how we can optimise our own processes. Consequentially, I feel much more in control and have been able to provide evidence of improvements in our effectiveness and efficiency in managing our Income Management process.
What were Blueplanet like to work with?
What benefits Southend-On-Sea have seen?
Previously our income management system was a bit of a ‘blackbox’ that was wrapped up in code and difficult to decipher. Blueplanet’s implementation was designed for us and gave us visibility of our income and most importantly, visibility of how the system operates so that we can fine tune our income management processes.
We are now able to provide reporting to our stakeholders much more effectively and timely. Evidencing our effectiveness as a department and ensuring that income is allocated to customer accounts in a timely manner.
Reduced end of day unallocated payments to 0.03%. A smart implementation has meant automatic allocation of around 96% of payments happens in real-time.
We have closed the gap significantly on our bank reconciliation so that we are reconciling almost in real time. This has had significant impact on us resolving any discrepancies quickly and effectively.
As a result of the increase in automatic allocations my team have more time to work on those difficult cases, leading to an overall reduction in the number of unallocated payments.
My team are no longer bogged down with many unallocated payments to work through. They were stuck in a loop of longer to resolve issues and bank reconciliation queries. They are now able to make the best use of their talents and now have more time strategize and optimise.
A clearer view of unallocated payments means it is now possible to correctly identify unpaid bills and less incorrect reminder notices and penalties are sent out.
The implementation of Income Manager has meant we have gained the ability to report on the performance of our different income streams, not only that but our increased efficiency has also meant that I now have time to analysis it. We can analyse the data and make further strategic decisions like what payment methods cost us the most to collect and how can we focus on reducing costs.
How our citizens are making payments, what payments are harder for them to make and identify potential areas for review.
Going live was extremely seamless because our training and preparation was thorough. We implemented subsequent products like Blueplanet Agent Referred Payments (ARP) after the initial implementation of Income Manager. As the initial build was excellent, we were able to go live very quickly.