Over half a million residents are served by Warwickshire County Council. The finance team deal with a wide variety of finance streams on a daily basis, including payments, business tariffs, parking fees for country parks, or collecting funds for a number of other service areas including social care, education, and libraries.

As part of a larger technology modernisation project, Warwickshire was seeking to upgrade from their on-premises Unit4 solution to a new income manager system that would prepare them for the future when ‘they are expected to be able to do more with less’. In addition to managing all of these income streams, it had to be able to handle cheques and cash returns, online payments, standing orders and direct debits, all of which would need to be achieved with seamless integration with their existing ERP system.

It took 8 weeks to implement HeyCentric IncomeManager in Warwickshire County Council and Warwickshire Pension Fund in July 2023.

The key objectives were:

• Remove labour intensive tasks
• For the council to be able to maintain the system themselves and puts the power into users hands
• Provide the organisation with complete visibility over their income and cash position

At the same time, Warwickshire County Council was migrating to Unit4 cloud, so the challenging process involved migrating first to a SQL server and then to Unit4 Cloud. Having a HeyCentric team dedicated to Warwickshire, the team was able to work closely with the council’s IT, Finance and Financial Systems teams forming a focused task force to complete the project. HeyCentric is well versed in Unit4 Cloud and provided Warwickshire with guidance and support throughout both phases. Because HeyCentric’s expert team understands how challenging a time like this can be, their team made it their highest priority to be flexible with deadlines and to provide speedy guidance and support whenever needed. Working together, Warwickshire County Council and HeyCentric achieved a seamless implementation.

As a result of Warwickshire moving to HeyCentric IncomeManager and WebPayments on the cloud, there is less maintenance and seamless updates, and they have also achieved some impressive results! The number of automatic allocations has increased exponentially from 0 to 65% since implementation, and this number continues to grow, with plans in place to increase this percentage even further enabling the finance team to concentrate on other value-added tasks.

It’s been important for the end user – “My team who work with HeyCentric have been massively impressed by how the solution makes their day to day life just simpler” – Stephen Robbins, Finance Projects and Systems Manager

And it’s been the important step forward that senior leadership team were looking for – “I think the confidence now that we have a system that’s fit for the future – that we have a income generation and income management solution that allows us to evolve and adapt to the way technology is taking us forward and we’re always looking to do more with less. These are kind of the enhancements and improvements that senior management have been looking for from our income management practices.”

We can’t of course do this case study without talking to the team on the HeyCentric system day in, day out, who are pleased with the results.

HeyCentric live by the motto that “We are in this together and We’re going to make this system really work hard for you”

Warwickshire could feel this too
“I think the most encouraging thing has been the way that HeyCentric have interacted with us as a customer. From day one, they’ve been very open and honest with us about the functionality, about what does work, what’s in the development plan and what needs a bit more thought. I think their client management has been fantastic. During the project implementation, nothing was too difficult. They were always on hand. They were very flexible at times when we had to change deadlines, they were able to build that into their plan. Resources were made available to support us as we needed, and in terms of onboarding us, our process was incredibly smooth and fantastic.”
– Stephen Robbins, Finance Projects and Systems Manager

Warwickshire have a lot of processes that they are looking to update and have taken the time to see how HeyCentric could be used in various scenarios in order to further improve these processes. Currently, they are developing a project to integrate HeyCentric X-Pay with their CRM solution, enabling them to automate customer payments through email journeys, and that is just the beginning!