With staff being slowed down by manual systems, West College required a finance system that gave control back to its workforce
As one of the largest educational establishments in the UK, West College Scotland provides access to over 3,000 courses. However, around 60% of the college’s sales ledgers and student invoices required an element of manual processing, which meant that the finance team were required to undertake the time-consuming process of rekeying information from one system to another. As this resulted in some credit control issues with debt collection, the team was looking for a more efficient system that would allow staff to focus on the main areas of their roles: analytics and completeness checking.
Head of Finance and Student Funding, Vivienne Mulholland, has worked with bluQube’s technology throughout her 15 years at the college. Confident in the software after having already been made aware of its capabilities, she was the project lead whilst we rolled out our bluQube Connect product to the college.
bluQube’s UNITe Connect is an efficient tool that links the bluQube modules with the UNITe product. Its ability to integrate with other systems means that information gathered across the two platforms and the wider organisation can be shared with ease.
“What we’re finding is that they [the staff] are coming back to us and saying: “wouldn’t it be good if we could do this?” Then they’re looking at further enhancements and other types of activity that they can get involved in that maybe beforehand they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do because they were doing a lot of manual processing.”
- Vivienne Mulholland, Head of Student Financing at West College Scotland
As the sales ledger and credit control teams were actively involved in the scoping of the project, the onboarding and implementation process took just a couple of days. West College’s employees were excited about the introduction of the new system given the success of the Connect Pay 360 feature, which had been implemented a couple of months prior.
Using Connect, we enabled all information collected by the college to be uploaded to a shared system accurately and in real-time, which eliminated the requirement for the finance team and non-finance teams to manually enter the same data into different systems.
Now, each time a student enrols in a course, the enrolment data is stored within UNITe. bluQube’s Connect module then extracts the necessary information and distributes it to the relevant parties, including external accounts, the address of the data, and the financial transaction itself. In practice, the speed at which this data is pulled through means that it is almost available in real-time alongside student enrolments.
Since its automated invoicing process means that West College staff no longer have to manually rekey each piece of information, efficiencies throughout the accounting team have significantly increased. Data inaccuracies caused by human error have been eliminated, and innovation has flourished as staff now have the capacity to focus on additional activities that are crucial to their role.
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