Case Study: How a top 20 accountancy practice transformed their business with Business Central

The Business 

A UK based top 20 accountancy practice, servicing small to large clients for taxation, corporate taxation advice, HR, etc. As an organisation, they had outgrown their Sage finance system. With a preference towards Microsoft technologies and desire to deploy a robust mid-market solution, Microsoft Dynamics NAV (now Business Central) was chosen as the preferred solution. 

The Challenges 

As the organisation has grown, the need to manage financial transactions for commercials and general accounting, together with the need for better reporting and business intelligence, resulted in a move to a more robust ERP system. A further challenge was the inability providing with the legacy finance application to easily integrate data from their Practice Management system and run dynamic Business Intelligence reporting across both their Finance and CRM solutions. 

Choosing Microsoft Dynamics and Advantage 

Having made the decision to replace their finance solution, The Accountancy firm adopted the standard approach to the search and selection of a new solution by outlining their key business requirements.  

The new solution had to meet the following criteria: 

• Provide better financial visibility and control – it is imperative that the organisation has complete visibility of financial data, to enable strategic decisions to be made effectively; 
• Provide a scalable and flexible solution – it is important that the solution had scalability to develop and grow as the business evolves; 
• Provide organisational efficiency – it is critical that time delays for the day to day running of the business were minimised to focus on business-critical tasks; 
• Flexible reporting - to enable the organisation to quickly export and analyse data at a glance; 
• Better Business Insight - so that the business can understand how to improve business performance to reinvest in frontline services. 
• Ease of integration with other line of business applications 

Following a review of leading Finance software providers, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central was selected due to its proven functionality and capabilities to meet their key objectives. Advantage was selected to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, because of understanding of the Professional Services – Accountancy sector, and experience within the financial services environment. 

The Benefits 

The core finance solution was successfully implemented and went live within 3 months of our initial conversations. Some of the benefits realised by the solution were: 

• Ease of integration of data across business applications. 
• Common set of Microsoft technologies used across the organisation. 
• Better and dynamic financial visibility and control. 
• Improved governance via use of the solution’s standard workflows. 
• Rapid adoption by users because of the Microsoft orientated interface. 

Conclusion 

This company remains confident in the selection of Microsoft Dynamics for its Finance solution. 

Since the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics and the system going live, this company has achieved significant time savings in the day-to-day running of the organisation, whilst now gaining better business insight into how to effectively remain efficient for the future.