Place2Be Modernises with Sage Intacct and Percipient

Children and young people’s mental health charity optimises performance and scales with new cloud deployment.

Place2Be is a leading UK children’s mental health charity, providing counselling, training and emotional wellbeing support to pupils, families and school communities across the country. As the charity experienced significant growth, it needed a finance system capable of managing multiple income streams, improving visibility and reducing reliance on spreadsheets.

Percipient implemented Sage Intacct, delivering automated financial processes, real-time reporting and enhanced budgeting capabilities, enabling Place2Be to make faster, data-driven decisions while supporting future growth and funding requirements.

About Place2Be

Place2Be is a children and young people’s mental health charity with almost 30 years of experience working with UK school pupils, families, and staff. It provides mental health support in schools through one-to-one and group counselling, using tried-and-tested, research-backed methods, and offers expert training and professional qualifications.

Place2Be has two primary income streams: counselling services to schools and training for community and school leaders in mental health. While the first runs reasonably consistently year-round, the second is more ad hoc.

A Modern Approach

Against a backdrop of high growth, Place2Be had outgrown its legacy finance system, which relied on extensive manual processes and spreadsheets. New funding represented an opportunity to invest in modern capabilities through a cloud-based financial management system, and following a detailed invitation to tender, the charity shortlisted two providers.

Place2Be needed a system which would recognise and track income streams from both areas of its operations, consultancy and training. It was paramount that both streams could be monitored in real time via contract costing or ad hoc invoices, and that month-end reporting was available, to better understand the charity’s position at any given time. Crucially, the charity needed to submit auto-renewals, review pricing strategies, and report to senior management in a forward-looking way, rather than relying on retrospective data.

Making the Right Choice: Sage Intacct

Place2Be selected Sage Intacct from Percipient because it closely matched all requirements and hit the critical points highlighted in the tender document. The most pivotal aspects included streamlining the PO/sales invoice journey, leveraging OCR to expedite accounts payable (AP) processes, and improving cost control, security, and visibility. The Percipient team’s professionalism and experience throughout the tender process confirmed it was the right option.

“It’s fair to say that we had a lot of requirements when going into this process, as we wanted to ensure that the system we selected not only met our needs currently, but as a charity with variable levels of funding, we wanted to ensure it could scale to support us in the future,” comments Louise Hollins, Project Accountant, Place2Be. “Sage Intacct was able to meet all of our requirements. In parallel, Percipient’s presentation was incredibly professional, and within just 10 minutes, we knew they were the right choice for us.”

A Smooth Transition

“Our deployment was incredibly smooth, helped massively by the fact that the Percipient team was outstanding. Communications were excellent, with tight controls, deadlines and collaboration at every point. Any issues were quickly dealt with, as the team was so responsive and keen to go above and beyond to ensure that the project was a success and that we were all in the best position to get the most from the system from the outset.”

Insights at a Click

Having gone live in 2022, Place2Be is already starting to see huge benefits, as Louise explains: “We are now benefiting from a more streamlined, intuitive way of working. Reporting functionality enables senior management to view a dashboard, track KPIs and headline figures, and drill down into more detail as needed. You can investigate anomalies with a few clicks to understand the why behind the what.

“In our sector, transparency is everything, and with Sage Intacct, costs can easily be assigned to different services, and we can manage P&L, budgets and headcount with all of the figures literally at our fingertips. We can track any cost with a single click and quickly create reports, allowing us to report to our senior leadership team, funding groups, and regulatory authorities. Similarly, cybersecurity is a major concern right now, and with its cloud-native deployment model, we have full confidence that Sage Intacct has this covered.

“Having been using the system for a year or so now, we’re really seeing the value. User feedback has been fantastic. The system is set up so everyone has single sign-on via a Microsoft 365 account, and it flags KPIs and insights that might be helpful for them to see.

Making Numbers Friendlier

“Financial management can be daunting, but Sage Intacct really is a game changer: it makes numbers friendlier! It’s a great tool that helps us understand the story behind the data as we can slice and dice it in different ways,” Louise concludes.

“Being able to access the Sage community and not-for-profit user groups via Percipient’s network of customers is a massive value add, and the strong relationships we have formed throughout this process have given us a great foundation from which to get the most out of the system.

“In conjunction with Percipient’s professionalism, experience and expertise in the not-for-profit sector, we are confident that we’re in a great position from which to continue delivering the best services to our market, secure funding and scale our operations as needed in the coming years.”

Sage Intacct Partner for Non-Profits

If you’d like to learn more about Sage Intacct, our work with Place2Be, or how we can help your non-profit business, please get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.