Habinteg Housing has chosen Orchard’s financial management system to streamline its accounts and purchasing workflows.
Habinteg was experiencing limitations with their previous Microsoft Dynamics system, in particular a P2P module to make its purchasing and invoicing processes more efficient. The Habinteg team also struggled to access training and documentation for their dated systems and found them cumbersome and difficult to use.
After comparing multiple options, including an upgrade of its existing system as well as some free and paid-for options, Habinteg selected Orchard as its new partner, selecting its financial management system based on OpenAccounts, eBIS and V1.
Andrew Crompton, director of finance and resources, Habinteg Housing, said, “Orchard appealed to us as a single solution to our finance workflow. We’d had immense problems before because we had two systems feeding into each other but the interfaces didn’t work well, leading to registration errors and a huge amount of work for our finance team to tidy up. We also had trouble getting training and documentation for the old system, plus upgrading to a newer version would have cost us more than a whole new system.
“We chose Orchard partly because of the usability and functionality, but also because of the relationship we’d built up with them. We had a few key priorities, mainly around functionality, training and documentation as well as the IT support to handle integration, and we were persuaded on all of these.”
The integration process for Habinteg’s new finance system coincided with the beginning of the lockdown so both Orchard and Habinteg’s teams had to complete the setup and integration while working remotely.
Crompton said, “One of the main reasons for our move to Orchard was to shift to a system that was much more intuitive. I received my first invoices through eBIS yesterday and deliberately didn’t use the guide, yet it was all pretty obvious what I was supposed to do and where everything was.”
Like everyone else, Habinteg was forced to make significant changes to its working processes very quickly in order to enable its teams to work remotely during the lockdown.
Crompton said, “We only had one week to get our back-office staff working from home and set everybody up with the IT they needed for their roles, but everyone has taken to it really well.”
While final integration of the Orchard system is still ongoing, Habinteg expects that eBIS will enable it to make flexible working more widespread even after the lockdown has been eased.
Crompton said, “For remote working, eBIS is a perfect tool. We’d had agile working on our agenda for a while and wanted to make it possible for staff to work remotely; the opportunities the current situation has presented will make it likely that we’ll work far more flexibly in future.”
