Social investment fund management and advisory firm Tshikululu Social Investments has partnered with Lorge to automate and streamline its financial processes. The company is already profiting from automation, as it managed to recover the costs of its initial project within a few months.
Duplicate capturing was the company's biggest challenge. Tshikululu was running various systems that weren't integrated and the data needed to be captured manually across these systems. It had to capture everything in the external system and then accountants had to recapture all that information into Sage 300.
Tshikululu Social Investments CFO Alistair Wagner says the firm partnered with Lorge to standardise and automate its management accounts across all clients. "Firstly, we looked at a new system for our back-office that integrates with Sage 300. We then started off by automating our payments; this was a small part of the process, but the impact was significant."
He says Tshikululu managed to recover the costs of the initial project within months. "The time it takes to authorise and process a payment is now a fraction of what it used to be. Because all the systems are now integrated, the data is automatically shared across systems - the data resides in our core line of business system and none of it goes into Sage 300. The entire process is now automated," he explains.
Lorge CEO Neville Govender says in today’s competitive business environment, companies like Tshikululu Social Investments need to extract optimal value from their data and software. "Lorge understands the dynamics of automated processing. We help our clients to keep operating with precise, seamless and refined integration across a full spectrum of business processes.
"That is why we provide financial services software to help businesses in credit union, banking, investment, insurance, brokerage, title and other financial services institutions to meet the challenges of today’s dynamic and competitive environment," he adds.
Wagner comments: "Unlike the previous inefficient paper-based processes, automation enables us to track any payment at any stage of the process. The final step in the process is automating procurement by creating creditors.
“The system will then automatically create a creditor on approval of the invoice. Security controls have been built in to deal with duplicate payments, etc. This will finalise the automation process and integration with the back-office completely."
"Biggest saving has been on people and time. Automation has made our business scalable, the volumes we are processing now in a fraction of the time is massive compared to what it used to be. If we hadn't followed this route, we would have had to employ an army of people, there would have been many mistakes; eg, wrongful payments. These errors would also incur huge costs," he explains.
Commenting on the partnership with Lorge, Wagner says: "Automating certain processes are complex, but the team at Lorge always managed to find a solution for any challenge. They understand our chart of accounts and our financial systems. Over a period of 24 years, we have solidified our partnership with Lorge; their support has been phenomenal, they are always there and always deliver."
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