The Nottingham Building Society

The Nottingham is an award-winning building society and estate agency operating online and via their network of over 60 branches.

Maintaining efficient financial controls within the back office is a key part of delivering this service. To this end, the building society has deployed Aurum Solutions to manage their complex bank statement reconciliations.

The Nottingham was a long term user of the EasiRec reconciliation system. Over time an increasing number of manual workarounds had become necessary in order to manage the building society’s developing operational complexity. Recognising that a more effective solution was required, the society evaluated a number of alternatives, as Eddie Inskip, Financial Systems and Forecasting Manager at The Nottingham, explains:

"We are committed to a process of continual improvement over our financial controls and back office efficiency."

 

He continued, “We looked at three different options. The first was to use a reconciliation module from our General Ledger system. The second was a high-end reconciliation system, and the third was Aurum Solutions. 

"Aurum quickly became our favoured option.”

The process of migrating from the legacy system to the new platform was straightforward thanks to Aurum Solution’s project planning and assistance. “Once the training had been delivered, our users were very keen to get started and, once we were live, they didn’t want to go back,” Eddie adds.

The Nottingham have 15 different bank accounts with thousands of transactions to reconcile daily, including cash, cheques, Faster Payments, BACS , CHAPS, debit and credit card receipts. Due to the large transaction volumes involved, The Nottingham’s GL system is updated with daily aggregated totals for each of the transaction types.

Eddie explains:

“This poses a challenge as we need transaction level matching. Aurum Solution’s consultants recommended a powerful three-way reconciliation process, using data from the GL, bank statements and our CRM system. This has worked very well.”

 

Bank statements are imported into the platform along with transactions from the CRM system, and this data is used to reconcile against the GL. Eddie notes: “This also ensures that all of our systems are aligned from a financial control and consistency perspective.”

Each day the society downloads a single file from its bank containing transactions for all their bank accounts. Aurum’s platform then splits this data into the different accounts for reconciliation purposes, enabling the work to be carried out by different users.

In addition to the main users, other building society staff use the software query and reporting tools to determine answers to particular questions, such as whether a specific cheque has been cashed. “The deployment via Citrix means the software is available on any desktop, which offers a lot of flexibility for our users to access the reports,” adds Eddie.

The complexity in Nottingham’s reconciliations is illustrated by the fact that not all accounts are reconciled in the same way. For example, cheques are banked by branches and these are aggregated into daily branch totals. The platform, therefore has to manage one-to-one matching and one-to-many matching as well as catering for the time difference between cheques being received and cleared.

Eddie explains the benefits experienced from implementing Aurum Solutions platform:

 

“Previously we ran a monthly reconciliation but we have been able to move to a faster, more efficient, daily bank reconciliation which allows us to investigate outstanding items on a daily basis.”

 

“There are clear benefits in terms of improved and consolidated financial control. We have greater transparency and operational flexibility, meaning we can deal effectively with any changes to our business such as adding new accounts.”

 

“One of the best aspects of working with Aurum Solutions is they always take a professional consultative approach, and establish a clear understanding of what we are looking to achieve. They are very practical, applying their knowledge of industry best practice to the process of improving the management of our reconciliations.”

“I’ve worked with many IT suppliers, and have to say that Aurum Solution’s approach is refreshingly different. From the outset they were focused on helping to solve our business problems and getting the job done efficiently. If something only takes their experienced consultants half a day, then that is what we are charged.”

“We also manage the reconciliations for all of The Nottingham’s subsidiaries, and we are continuing to bring these reconciliations onto Aurums solutions platform."