Cidari switch to Sage Intacct for best in class MAT accounting

About Cidari

Cidari Multi Academy Trust, established in November 2013, is part of the Blackburn Diocese. Cidari Multi Academy Trust includes converter and sponsored academies, a mix of Voluntary Aided and Voluntary Controlled primary, secondary and community schools across Blackpool, Blackburn and Lancashire.

Having previously used PS Financials and Sage 200, Cidari Multi Academy Trust recognised the need to switch to a powerful cloud accounting solution to support growth and efficiencies in their business. Cidari Multi Academy Trust approached ION to help create an accounting solution that would scale with their business.

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Objectives

The key objective for Cidari was to resolve some key challenges that were affecting the day-to-day operations of the trust. This including the significant time it took to produce accounting reports for the academies and the flexibility to split between capital and revenue reporting. This compounded problems in identifying spend against certain funding types, both restricted and unrestricted, detailed reports of spend by department by academy and checking payment of invoices by academy.

Cidari also wanted to move to a full-scale cloud technology to remove their on-premise IT costs and adopt a best-in-class cloud accountancy system that would allow them to easily integrate their expenses system, automate their accounts payable process and ultimately scale and grow their business in alignment their plans and ambitions.

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Cidari + Sage Intacct

Cidari Multi Academy Trust now has the ability, via Sage Intacct dimensional reporting, to exceed all of their reporting needs and requirements across their growing multi academy trust.

Cidari Multi Academy Trust have utilised Sage Intacct’s open API which allows them to connect centralise and consolidate all of their processes across their integration systems and leveraged this key data via Sage Intacct’s financial reporting.

In Sage Intacct, Cidari Multi Academy Trust now has a true cloud platform built for multi-entity financial management, which allows all users to be on the same version without complicated or expensive upgrades. This has made an annual cost saving to Cidari Multi Academy Trust.