Make-A-Wish Selects m-hance to Improve Reporting
Make-A-Wish Foundation UK, a charity specialising in granting magical wishes to children and young people fighting life-threatening conditions, is implementing an integrated system comprising a suite of financial management, electronic procurement, human resources (HR) and payroll and expenses solutions from m-hance. This new system will enable Make-A-Wish to significantly reduce manually-intensive administration, improve management reporting and manage its costs and income streams more effectively to support its future growth plans. The m-hance system will be rolled-out in a phased approach from April 2012.
Make-A-Wish has expanded rapidly in recent years, which has seen the organisation’s income grow considerably to £6m. The charity granted 898 wishes in 2011, compared with 663 in 2010, and its number of applicants for wishes grew by 51% over the same period, placing a strain on its existing systems and manual-based processes.
The charity will replace manually-intensive paper processes with automated electronic procedures. This includes automating employee expenses, requisitions, purchase orders and tailored management reports, eliminating the need to store and extract data from multiple Excel spreadsheets, which are often out-of-date. The system’s advanced reporting capabilities (using Jet Reports’ functionality) will also be integrated with Make-A-Wish’s donorflex fundraising software to provide easy comparison between budgets, forecasts and actual spend to enable the organisation to monitor its income streams more effectively.
Lynne Mackintosh, director of finance at Make-A-Wish Foundation UK, said: “As the organisation has grown so too has our need for more timely and accurate information. Our existing system can no longer cope with the volumes of data we are processing and is very restrictive both in terms of management reporting and analysis. We therefore decided to make a long-term investment in market-leading software in order to achieve efficiency savings both now and in the future.”
Mackintosh continued: “After evaluating several software providers, m-hance’s system was the closest fit to our business requirements and offered the advanced functionality we needed to support us as we continue to grow. The company also has an excellent reputation in the not-for-profit sector.”