The Crown Estate implements a flexible payment platform from Albany Software
ALBACS gives property management company greater flexibility over payment options and more control of processes
The Crown Estate, a UK-wide property company, has purchased ALBACScs from pioneering developer of electronic payment software solutions, Albany Software. Albany’s corporate, multi-user Bacs payment solution will provide The Crown Estate with greater flexibility and control over its payment processes. The Crown Estate will also be utilising the Direct Debit module, built into ALBACS, to allow its tenants to realise the benefits of efficient and convenient Direct Debit payments.
With a real estate portfolio throughout the UK consisting of commercial and residential property, agriculture, farm estates and a marine portfolio, The Crown Estate is worth over £6 billion and pays all of its revenue surplus to the Treasury for the benefit of UK taxpayers. The organisation has amassed a large number of staff and suppliers, from local blacksmiths through to local authorities and private contractors, all of which are paid through the Bacs system.
The purchase of ALBACScs was a natural progression from Albany’s ALBACSip solution used by The Crown Estate for the past four years. David Spratt, Senior Business Systems Analyst at The Crown Estate, explains, “ALBACSip has served us well as a single user standalone product. We looked to upgrade to ALBACScs to refresh our processes in line with the upgrade of our other IT systems.” Spratt continues, “With ALBACScs securely installed within our wide area network (WAN) we have secure remote access to it from any of our offices throughout the UK. This gives us a significant amount of flexibility as authorisation to process a payment file may need to come from a different location to the accounts department where it was originally created.”
ALBACScs is securely accessible by various workstations at The Crown Estate at any given time, easing the payment process with in-built workflows that prompt those responsible for entering the payment information into ALBACScs through the various stages up to final authorisation. Spratt explains, “Roles are now more clearly defined as access is split among the various processing stages. Authorisation levels mean we have better control and all payment files are sent through to Bacs via Bacstel-IP following digital ‘signing’ with a smart card and PIN, removing the need for authorising manually by signing paper.”
Following the successful implementation of ALBACScs, The Crown Estate is looking forward to utilising the Direct Debits functionality in order to offer the convenience of Direct Debits to its tenants. Spratt comments, “As well as having greater control over cash flow, Direct Debits have become an expected service offering and are much more convenient than other methods of collecting payment. They do not have to be amended as regularly as standing orders and remove the hassle of form-filling for our tenants.”
Spratt concludes, “Albany has delivered a secure and reliable payment platform for The Crown Estate. The upgrade implementation of ALBACScs was done in a day and has provided much needed agility as well as greater control over our payment processes.”
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