Pauline Quirke Academy streamlines business payment processes with Albany Software
Performing Arts Academy selects ALBACS to automatically manage hundreds of monthly membership payments
The Pauline Quirke Academy of Performing Arts (PQA), the weekend drama school that runs sessions up and down the country, has selected ALBACS from market leading e-transaction software author, Albany Software. The new payment software will update and streamline the academy's payments processes and comprehensively manage its hundreds of monthly transactions, affording the organisation a more fluid cash flow, whilst improving time and cost efficiency.
The purchase of the new software will greatly assist PQA in terms of its forecasting and cash flow. Fergus Sturrock, Business Systems Manager at the Academy and instrumental in the decision to implement the new software, comments, "We run a membership scheme for our students so everyone pays a certain amount per month. Collecting the payments by traditional means proved to be very problematic. Any errors in the recording of members' bank details would mean those standing orders went unpaid. But these missing payments wouldn't come to our attention until maybe six weeks past the payment due date, which impacted heavily on our cash flow."
Albany Software's fully automated ALBACS solution will replace paper-based standing orders previously used by the Pauline Quirke Academy, offering a considerable return on investment and greatly increasing business efficiency. The administration time and costs associated with paper payments stand to be almost eliminated thanks to the accuracy of the single point of data entry afforded by ALBACS. At the touch of a button, PQA can process all of its Direct Debit collection files, automatically generating notifications of all collections and receiving error reports directly from Bacs."
Sturrock says, "We were expending a lot of resource internally chasing failed payments and weren't receiving monies that were owed to us so we were really getting burnt at both ends of the process." He continues, "Albany Software's ALBACS with the Direct Debit module has changed things dramatically for us, with monthly membership payments arriving in our account regularly each month." Sturrock adds, "Any admin errors are now picked up at source as soon as we press the button to send the details to Bacs, so we know immediately if we need to take any action instead of waiting for weeks to find out."
The Pauline Quirke Academy runs drama classes on Saturday mornings and afternoons across the country for three hours at a time. Each session teaches between forty and fifty pupils and classes cover a mixture of disciplines including musical theatre, comedy, drama, film and television. Members can now set up a Direct Debit directly with the academy through ALBACS in order to pay their fees. Sturrock comments, "With the new system, once we have created a Direct Debit file for a member, we have no need to bother them again. All their details are verified very quickly and the whole process is painless for everyone."
Moving forward, the Academy is looking to convert all of their members from paying via standing orders to Direct Debit. This will allow the company to free up resources becoming more profitable. It will also enable them to explore different avenues of growth. Sturrock concludes, "The ability to forecast now that we have greater cash flow visibility is invaluable to driving the business forward - we can now budget for marketing and expansion."
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