CLIENT
Broadstone
SECTOR
Wealth Management
LOCATION
UK
Background
Broadstone is a leading UK-based independent pensions, investments and employee benefits specialist providing advice, bespoke services and solutions to clients from small businesses through to large corporates. Established over 40 years ago, Broadstone had a revenue of over £50m in 2022 and over 500 employees.
Jennifer Gould is the Group Financial Controller for Broadstone. She joined the company as part of an acquisition in 2012 and has been with the company and acquisition firm for over 15 years. She kindly agreed to speak to us about how Broadstone benefits from using IFA Dataflow.
The Challenge
Broadstone historically processed a high volume of commission statements. The statements were entered manually into the accounting systems, line by line.
It was a full-time job for one dedicated person every month to manually enter every single line of the commission revenue.
Broadstone then acquired several other businesses within a short period of time. These businesses were also manually processing commission statements every month.
All the acquired companies processed their commission statements by manually entering the data one line at a time. The manual processing of commission statements was becoming unmanageable for the Broadstone group as a whole.
While Broadstone implemented Xplan to streamline its Employee Benefits consultancy business and manage insurance policies and renewals for their clients, it investigated the market to see if there was a technical solution that would digitise the commission statements and remove manual processing.
Broadstone needed a solution that would scan the statements, removing the need to enter the data manually and import the data into Commpay (the commission processing bolt-on software linked to Xplan), so that the statements could be processed.
The Solution
IFA Dataflow was recommended by word of mouth. A Broadstone colleague had heard that a service was available where statements didn’t have to be keyed in manually.
“Someone had come up with a bright idea of being able to scan in commission statements, and it would recognise all the entries on the statement and pull it into a digital form.”
That person was Ian Lane, Managing Director and Founder of IFA Dataflow.
Now, Broadstone scans and sends all of its commission statements to IFA Dataflow each month. IFA Dataflow digitises the income statements for Broadstone and sends them to Broadstone’s software provider, Iress, to import. IFA Dataflow links into Commpay.
Broadstone then processes the imported statements against their policies to match commission receipts received against policy estimates.
Human error has been removed, and the process now takes a few seconds per statement to upload onto the IFA Dataflow site, instead of spending a full month entering the data manually line by line.
Key Benefits
Cost Savings
IFA Dataflow has enabled Broadstone to save the cost of one full-time employee per month on commission statement processing.
Eliminated Human Error
IFA Dataflow has removed human error due to manual keying of data, and now the data can be relied upon to be accurate.
Improved Processes
IFA Dataflow has dramatically improved and simplified the process – from scanning in and processing the statements in the system.
The Greatest Benefit
“The fact that the data inputting cycle is already done for us and those statements come in a digitised form removes so much time and effort from our end processing.”
– Jennifer Gould, Group Financial Controller, Broadstone.
Testimonial
“I would definitely recommend IFA Dataflow for firms doing a lot of manual data entry for commission statements. It’s a no-brainer. A few hundred pounds a month to have some statements scanned in versus the full-time salary of someone entering data and the human error that can result. It saves time, money and makes the process more accurate.”
– Jennifer Gould, Group Financial Controller, Broadstone
IFA Dataflow Team
If a statement is in an unusual or different format, the system might not recognise it correctly. IFA Dataflow will resolve the issue and write the code to pick up the correct columns and data. There is always a prompt answer, and it’s resolved quickly.
What our clients say
“I would definitely recommend IFA Dataflow for firms doing a lot of manual data entry for commission statements. It’s a no-brainer. A few hundred pounds a month to have some statements scanned in versus the full-time salary of someone entering data and the human error that can result. It saves time, money and makes the process more accurate.”
Jennifer Gould, Group Financial Controller, Broadstone
“We’ve utilised IFA Dataflow for the past few years and they continue to provide us with a really efficient service. Being able to call on a service that converts PDF files to CSV with such speedy turnaround times is one thing, but when the CSV files are returned in an IO compatible template it’s even more resourceful.”
Tim Gale, Circadian
“The paper statements can be 10 pages long or more, and have 25 different items of income renewal, where the different items must be totalled separately, and then by the time you get to the end, it doesn’t balance, so it all has to be checked again. This is where IFA Dataflow is an absolute lifesaver.”
Joanne Morgan, IFA Outsourcing
“The people who work at IFA Dataflow are very efficient and helpful. If I need a statement returned urgently, I can always rely on them to process this as top priority and return it to me right away.”
Nadine Key, Thorntons Investments
“You know how when you find an amazing hotel or restaurant sometimes you don’t want to tell other people about it and you want to keep it secret? Well I hesitate to write this, but one of the secrets behind Policy Services Limited’s ability to deal with millions of legacy commission entries per year has been IFADataflow”.
David Ness, Policy Services
“IFA Dataflow has streamlined our commission and fee processing so much that we are now able to import data from a pdf file at the touch of a couple of buttons. The time saved in data input has allowed us to concentrate on other areas of the business.”
Emma Wilde, Marketing Manager, Ascot Lloyd
“As a long term customer of IFA Dataflow, we have always found their service to be fast and efficient. The files are returned promptly, without any fuss and there is always someone on hand to help whenever required. They can be relied upon to help support the high standard of service we offer to our clients”.
