AIMing for savings

Software from Capita Payment Management has transformed income-handling processes common to housing associations and registered social landlords across the UK.

Paragon Community Housing Group Ltd incorporates Elmbridge Housing Trust (EHT) and Richmond upon Thames Churches Housing Trust (RuTCHT). As a major provider of affordable housing, Paragon manages over 8000 properties throughout Surrey and South West London. Paragon was looking to automate the process of posting rental income to finance systems, thus reducing the amount of staff time processing the data and improving the data's accuracy.

Andy Anderson, the Project Manager for Application Systems at Paragon, describes the main reasons behind the Group’s decision to implement Capita’s AIM (income management) product:

“We recognised that officers were spending an excessive amount of time manually processing files, and that electronic processing had to be introduced. We knew of AIM, and that it was the market leader in income management, so we investigated it’s capability for our business and quickly decided that it could deliver immediate time savings and update information more efficiently – in terms of speed and accuracy.”

Paragon implemented Capita’s Income Management software solution along with project management, installation and configuration consultancy services. The Income Management application forms part of the total Capita Payment Management solution.

Taking feeds of payment details from other Capita or third party payment solutions, the Income Management application provides a central transaction database to control income and reconciliation. The implementation of AIM has resulted in the following benefits:

• In excess of 200 manual processes eliminated and replaced with the central, automated solution accommodating various payment methods and validating third party payment files ensuring accurate account posting
• Some files now go through only three processes (essential to AIM functionality), as opposed to the 16 previously, and require no manual processing
• Automated procedures save 15 staff hours spent formatting data prior to posting within the IT department
• No formatting is now needed – Capita’s AIM has been configured to deal with all incoming file formats
• Information can be filtered into single or multiple daily and time-specific files for onward posting to in-house applications
• The average length of time to process a payment has been reduced from three days to just one
• Only two of Paragon’s staff are needed to interact with the AIM system; a member of each team within the Finance and IT departments
• Improvements to the speed of processing customers’ end-of-week payments, adding to greater customer satisfaction.

Of course, the return on Paragon’s investment was at the forefront of deciding upon the AIM implementation. Andy knew that, with Capita’s software solution, he was receiving value for money, affirming: “cost was an important factor in any decision, and with the AIM software and implementation, services were reasonably set and we could see an immediate payback on our investment.”