Case Study

London Borough of Camden

The introduction of the Aspien Corporate Debt Recovery System has had a major impact on this authority.

Collection processes have now been automated by means of Ash’s workflow facility freeing staff to concentrate on ‘hard to collect’ debts. We no longer have to check what has happened – we only look at what has not happened.

We wanted a single view of debt – not only to help us collect money more efficiently but to help our more vulnerable residents to get on top of their indebtedness to the council. The ability to consolidate debts and set up payments arrangements and issue statements is a real benefit. Coupled with this is the ease with which we can initiate paperless direct debits. Last year we increased our direct debits by 33%.

The work that the system does to reconcile legacy systems with GL on a nightly basis has already made closing the accounts this year so much quicker and more reliable. The accountants appreciate the fact that the system provides an up to date, balanced position every morning resulting in a significant reduction in the need for journals. My team would take 2-3 weeks every month to reconcile with GL and now we spend no time on it at all.

A significant issue we used to have pre-Ash was the volume of unallocated cash and the amount of effort involved in reallocating it. Post-Ash this has been reduced by 90%.

The system allows us to set up CIL (Community Infrastructure Levy) to post the actual income to the correct income codes i.e. to allocate automatically to admin charges, strategic and local projects – eliminating the need for journals.

We have always regarded credit calling as an important means of recovering debt. We use the Tel Solutions product for this. Ash have now integrated their solution with it to provide a highly efficient and effective means of contacting debtors.

Enhanced management reporting greatly facilitates decision making and reduces the production of some returns (e.g. CIPFA) to a matter of minutes.

The implementation of this system has resulted in significant efficiency savings and has allowed the Credit Control Team to concentrate on what is important and to ‘get things right first time’.

Following the implementation the Aspien system we have installed further modules from Ash i.e.:-

Sundry Debtor Billing.

Commercial Rents Management.

Childcare Centres Administration.