Huntingdonshire District Council

All three councils – Huntingdonshire, Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire – went live with OneCouncil in 2018, with 237 active users at Huntingdonshire moving to the new system in July 2018.

The council now uses TechnologyOne’s OneCouncil solution for budgeting, forecasting, performance planning, accounts payable, purchasing and debtor functions.

“The joint procurement has been beneficial for a combination of reasons. There’s an expectancy it will have cost benefits for all three authorities,” said Edwards.

All three councils are also benefiting from shared knowledge and best practice when it comes to using the TechnologyOne platform, with employees often working together in the different council’s offices to collaborate on projects.

By digitally transforming Huntingdonshire’s finance operations, the council has also seen time saving benefits delivered through automation. Whereas the council used to have to sort through hundreds of paper invoices and purchase orders and then send to be scanned, this is now done electronically.

The council has also managed to reduce its bank account reconciliation process, that used to require numerous spreadsheets and considerable data cross checking, down from a month-long process to between seven and 10 days.

“That's been a big positive. By freeing up time and removing the time constraints, the person who carries out bank reconciliation now spends a lot more time working on more valuable activities for the council,” said Edwards.

Dozens of budget holders across the council, alongside the finance team, can now access the SaaS system wherever they are via their Council laptop. This has added to greater business intelligence across the council, as well as ensuring faster access to important financial information.

“The system is really intuitive and by having more information accessible in a self-service way, business managers now have more visibility and ownership around forecasting and budgets. They can also drill down in granular detail to even see copies of supplier invoices in the same system,” said Edwards.

“As well as automating more processes and data entry, we’ve been able to improve commitment accounting, forecasting and budget setting. We’re seeing a higher use of purchase orders and reporting, with budget holders more engaged,” she added.

By replacing legacy finance systems that had been in place at Huntingdonshire District Council for 20 years, the council has realised a number of benefits, from reducing costs and downtime caused by on-premise IT upgrades, through to making the organisation more resilient when unforeseen crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, arise.

By switching to TechnologyOne’s SaaS solution, the software company now seamlessly upgrades the platform on their behalf, instead of council IT staff on-premise, saving the finance department huge amounts of downtime.

“When we used to upgrade the old system, we lost three to four days use, whereas now it can all be done remotely overnight. Security patches are going in without the system being down as well,” said Edwards. “It’s also a lot easier to schedule upgrades, as we're not relying on the IT support within our own organisation, which has to balance competing priorities.”

By moving to TechnologyOne SaaS, powered by Amazon Web Services, the council’s finance team also managed to function as normal, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused office and council service closures in March 2020.

“Thankfully, remote working wasn't a problem for us, as TechnologyOne dove-tailed nicely into our ‘Council Anywhere’ approach, where employees could access business systems via laptops from home,” said Edwards. “But where TechnologyOne really came into its own, was in helping the council pay COVID-related business support grants to local businesses.”

To support local businesses during the pandemic, the UK government asked councils to support them with awarding grants. The finance team managed to draw upon the extra functionality that TechnologyOne’s system offered.

“We paid all the business grants out via TechnologyOne, and it was because we were able to import the information and manipulate it, that it really came into its own. It was a big task and TechnologyOne was instrumental in this. It was a big tick in the box for them, winning over quite a few people in the business to the new system,” said Edwards.