NetSuite for Charities – Derby County Community Trust

Derby County Community Trust is the award-winning charitable trust linked to Derby County Football Club. It is a bold non-profit that works to improve lives across Derbyshire through sport, physical activity and education.

The Trust runs a wide and growing set of programmes that build talent pathways and promote opportunity and diversity. Its work is recognised and respected at local, national and international level by a range of partners, funders and participants. It is underpinned by Derby County Football Club’s commitment to enhance the lives of people in their community.

What were Derby County Community Trust’s challenges?

As the Trust’s work grew, financial admin became harder. The old Chorus ERP system could no longer keep up, and the Trust needed charity financial reporting software that could give fast, reliable data.

The demands for accurate reporting of any charity requires quick access to reliable data that the Chorus system could not deliver. This, combined with general inefficiencies related to the purchasing process, resulted in the Finance Team and Programme Managers alike undertaking lengthy, manual, paper-based processes that restricted the time available to focus on developing the organisation.

The Trust asked Derby County Football Club’s finance team for advice with their systems review. The Club had faced similar challenges and had recently implemented a new ERP – Oracle NetSuite, deployed and supported by Eureka Solutions – and had no hesitation in recommending that the Trust approach Eureka Solutions for advice.

“We definitely needed something new that was more efficient and flexible to our requirements. The manual, paper-based processes were hindering our Finance Team in delivering the accuracy in reporting that is essential for a complex non-profit organisation like Derby County Community Trust. We were looking for a system that would give us proper visibility of the position of any and all of our programmes when we needed it.”

– Debbie Hewkin, Finance Manager, Derby County Community Trust

The Solution – NetSuite ERP

On the Club’s advice, Derby County Community Trust spoke with Eureka Solutions to see if the NetSuite ERP solution that had achieved transformational results for the Club would satisfy the requirements of the growing, ambitious charitable Trust.

Eureka Solutions has deep experience implementing systems for non-profit organisations and the day-to-day issues they face. The Trust were confident that this experience, combined with the flexibility and functionality NetSuite – the world’s number one cloud-based ERP – would deliver the visibility and accountability that they required.

NetSuite unifies all Derby County Community Trust’s key data in one single cloud-based solution, accessible via a browser from any location. NetSuite’s role-based dashboards enable not only the Finance Team, but also Programme Managers, to have access to view and process the information they need to do their jobs efficiently.

The variety of programmes run by the Trust have diverse reporting requirements. One programme might have one funder, where another might have three different funds related to it. Each manager needs to report differently.

Flexible reporting and paper-free processes

“NetSuite enables us to create the variety of reports we need directly from the system. You can literally get any report you want. Our Programme Managers can slice and dice data to suit the requirements of their funders, and this saves each one of them hours of time each month, freeing them up to focus on quality delivery of our activities. Compared to our previous system the time spent on reporting has been reduced cumulatively by at least 10 days a month across our programme teams.”

Debbie Hewkin, Finance Manager, Derby County Community Trust

For Debbie and the Finance Team, efficiencies have also been gained within the procurement process. With standardised processing of approvals and management of purchase orders, the team have increased control and reporting on the procurement side, which Debbie says “works really, really well – it makes things a lot easier and we have been able to do away with our paper-based system.”

Remote working and responsive support

The Trust has also benefited from the wide range of ‘SuiteApps’ that are designed to work seamlessly within NetSuite, further extending its functionality in particular areas. For the Trust’s Finance Team specifically these have enhanced the planning, budgeting, forecasting and – especially useful during 2020 – re-forecasting capabilities of the system, as well as the scanning and capturing of invoices directly into NetSuite.

An additional benefit is that, with NetSuite, the transition to remote working as and when required causes no disruption to the Finance Team. Everything is accessible online, including invoices, meaning that “nothing is impacted from a finance point of view.”

As for working with Eureka Solutions, Debbie commented,

“Our confidence in Eureka Solutions was well rewarded. The implementation itself went very smoothly; it was seamless. In terms of ongoing support, they are knowledgeable, responsive and quick to resolve any query or advise us on getting the most out of our system.”

Benefits realised

• Reporting now takes far less time, saving at least 10 days each month across the Trust’s Programme Managers.
• Paper and manual steps have been removed from the procurement process.
• Complete visibility of the financial position, either at an individual programme or at a consolidated level, as required.
• Reporting is flexible, accurate, real time, which improves decision making.

Future plans

As Derby County Community Trust continues to grow and funding increases as they take on more and more projects, the 60+ staff are busier than ever delivering high-quality frontline services. NetSuite’s flexibility and scalability facilitates this growth without proportionately increasing strain on the finance function.

Debbie and her team intend to continue to work closely with Eureka Solution to ensure they get the most out of their system and keep up-to-date with the system enhancements that are automatically delivered to all users twice yearly, as well as potentially exploring how NetSuite’s inbuilt CRM functionality could further increase efficiencies.