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.

0%
of payments happens in real-time.
0%
end of day unallocated payments.
0%
visibility of income streams.

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.

Andrew Walker, Finance Manager, Financial Planning & Control Department

Background

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council is the local authority of Southend-on-Sea in Essex. As a local authority, Southend-on-Sea Borough Council, have ultimate responsibility to the citizens and businesses of the Borough from whom they collect taxes. Southend-on-Sea Borough Council want to provide the best value for money for their community and have placed this as one of their top priorities.

Our issue

Southend-on-Sea were faced daily with many unallocated income transactions due our previous system’s inability to allocate payments ‘smartly’. This led to difficulties in processing and managing those unallocated payments causing a severe drain on our teams time.

Our Bank reconciliation queries were more difficult to resolve. As a result, we were chasing our tail and did not have adequate time to analyse the data or team performance.