Viridian Housing has chosen a dedicated asset management system to help its compliance with SORP and IFRS regulations, replacing its widespread reliance on spreadsheets. With assets of £960 million and 16,000 properties, the housing provider is using Asset4000 from Real Asset Management to create a central register of its 200,000 asset records. After a four-month implementation, the new system went live in March 2010. A spokesperson for Real Asset Management said that the value of the contract was £41,795.
Clare Togneri, financial reporting and taxation manager, Viridian Housing, explained, “The situation wasn’t ideal, but the system was manageable until the need to implement component accounting became more prevalent. To comply with IFRS and the Statement of Recommended Practice (SoRP), we needed a dedicated asset register in order to cope with the volume and intricacy of the data required.”
Asset4000 provides Viridian with component accounting detail and integration with its existing financial package, saving the finance team time and helping them manage the assets more effectively.
Togneri said, “The asset register gives us more transparent data and increased financial control. Now that the process has moved on from spreadsheets, it is less susceptible to human error. Importantly, the automation central to the system also saves the finance team time by reducing manual data input.
“We can also upload data files in large batches – hundreds of lines at a time – helping us make the process more efficient, and allowing us to spend more time on data analysis.”
