Somerset House Trust manages the conservation and development of Somerset House, an 18th Century palace located on the Strand in Central London. It is now primarily used as a cultural centre, hosting music concerts, films, visual arts exhibitions and, during the winter months, an open air ice rink.
It is hoped the project will provide the Trust with greater spending transparency together with improved invoice management and retrieval.
The systems have been integrated with Somerset House’s existing Sage Line 50 accounting system. This has enabled the Trust to electronically store thousands of invoices and related documents and pay suppliers electronically.
Joe Ghandhi, director of finance for Somerset House, said: We evaluated 17 document management suppliers and Version One was the only company we found that could seamlessly integrate its electronic archiving and payment solution into Sage Line 50, providing us with a one-stop solution for our document management needs.
As the number of events held at Somerset House increases, the Trust needed a more reliable document management system that would provide it with more efficient access to documents relating to the costs of running the estate.
The Trust also needed to improve its invoice management and retrieval procedures as well as improve its electronic payment processes to speed up payments to suppliers and reduce the risk of fraud and lost cheques.
Ghandhi said: It’s important that we have a clear, accurate and readily accessible record of what we spend. Until now, we have had to trawl through filing cabinets to locate invoices which we then had to photocopy. This has proven both inefficient and costly.
With the Trust’s new system, all invoices and related documents received at Somerset House are scanned using a Kodak scanner and automatically linked to the correct account in Sage Line 50.
With DbArchive tightly linking into our Sage Line 50 accounting system we are provided with a permanent record of all our outgoings and with DbBACS-IP communicating with Sage, this eliminates duplication in the processing of payments, said Ghandhi.
The Trust no longer has to print, photocopy, post and manually file its financial documents, making the invoice process more efficient. These efficiency savings will be especially important over the next nine months as we increase the number of events on our site as well as number of tenants, said Ghandhi.
