Changing Financial Dimensions at Blackburn Rovers

With the football transfer market and players wages an almost constant source of news and speculation, it is easy to get caught up in the multimillion pound headlines and overlook the complex, behind-the-scenes financial support systems which are vital for the top football clubs to efficiently run their businesses.

Staff at Blackburn Rovers are always extremely busy handling the administration of what is a very diverse company.  Simply being in football's top flight brings with it much additional revenue which has to be accounted for, and efficiency and functionality within the club's financial infrastructure are paramount.

Barbara Hoyle, Financial Controller at Blackburn Rovers, explained: "When the time came to update our financial support systems, we set a number of key criteria. Our preference was for a solution written in SQL, as it would cope well with a huge volume of transactions and offer scalability - great potential for the future. As well as being flexible, our final choice needed to offer the facility for e-commerce and, above all, top-notch analytical capabilities which would enable us to improve reporting and exercise better control over expenditure across all areas of the business."

Highly Adaptable
Having decided that a Microsoft Dynamics™ GP financial solution more than met its criteria, the club appointed JMC IT to advise on and manage the implementation, as well as provide training and ongoing support. Microsoft Dynamics™ GP offers extensive drilldowns and querying options for almost instant access to detailed data. A highly adaptable solution, it can be personalised to offer facilities such as short-cuts to other applications, whilst definable, proactive business alerts help users keep tabs on important business indicators.

In addition to essential financial modules, Blackburn Rovers also installed reporting options from FRx Software and a Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) tool which facilitates very detailed analysis of sales and purchase transactions, vastly improving cost control and reporting capabilities.

The MDA tool adds multiple dimensions to transactions without the need to create or redefine chart of account codes. Using definable groups - such as departments, product lines, regions or employees - and codes, MDA enables the user to define unlimited projects and associate these with affected revenue or expense accounts, making it easy to analyse such information by project. Highly specific activity can thus be categorised and tracked with ease, increasing the value of financial information with virtually no additional administrative burden.

Barbara added: "As well as superb reporting and analysis capability, our new financial solution provides a level of accountability which is essential in presentations to the board and management team. The MDA tool allows us to produce profit/loss accounts for every game. As long as the necessary systems are in place to ensure that all the relevant items of income and expenditure are assigned to MDA, it can be an extremely useful tool. We can also stay in greater control of expenses relating to Benefits In Kind (BIK) for tax purposes: with over 1,800 purchase invoices every month, identifying those expenses applicable to BIK at the end of the year was a difficult and extremely time-consuming exercise - but MDA has made it easy."

Impressive Benefits
The benefits the club reaped from its new solution were so impressive, that Blackburn Rovers have invested in a Purchase Order Processing module and an online Requisitioning System.

Barbara concluded: "Our new system has saved a huge amount of time and resource and eased levels of staff frustration considerably, as it is now so easy to locate relevant information quickly. We can't speak highly enough of JMC: all the staff have been very professional and we suffered no down-time during the installation. JMC's training is also excellent, and the modem link works brilliantly to support us on an ongoing basis.

"As a club, it's vital that we have faith and trust in our partners - JMC staff have proven their skills and knowledge many times and, in identifying potential issues and resolving them ahead of time, they have justified our trust. We would have no hesitation in recommending JMC to other businesses, especially clubs like ourselves which could benefit from JMC's experience in this specialised area."