Day-to-day invoice management and budget control were costing Curlew valuable time and resources. Alasco’s platform is integral to Curlew Capital to producing cost reports and comparing actual to budget.
Producing cost reports and comparing actual to budget
With a focus on top university towns and cities in the UK and the Netherlands, Curlew’s multi-disciplinary team create and manage investments for institutional investors. The building design, amenities and management of every location are planned with the well-being of residents in mind.
But with growing interests to manage, Curlew wanted to enhance its ability to keep reliable, real-time accounts of project budgets and invoices. That’s when the team looked to Alasco for a new approach to invoice management and budget control. We caught up with Development Director, Greg Fox, and Development Analyst, Kirsten Damant, to find out more about Curlew’s journey.
“Excel required a lot of manual data entry and this could lead to mistakes. It was also an accounting, rather than a development-specific model, which made sharing data between departments difficult.” - Greg Fox, Development Director
Despite tracking invoices and budgets digitally in Excel, day-to-day invoice management and budget control were costing Curlew valuable time and resources. Every invoice had to be checked, organised, paid and matched against the appropriate budget manually.
As well as manual data entry increasing the potential for error, Kirsten explains that managing costs and spending in excel was labour intensive for the team and the resulting account was never completely up-to-date. They had no way to keep a reliable, real-time account of how much was being spent on each project. Paperwork also wasn’t easily accessible and invoices could fall through the cracks, causing delays in approval and progress.
With Alasco’s invoicing features, the Curlew team can now split all project invoices down to individual contractors and cash flows. There’s no more manual data entry or checking and organising invoices then matching them to the right budget because it’s all automated by digitised processes in Alasco.
“On top of being user-friendly, Alasco understands the work we do. Once we were on board, the Alasco team spent a lot of time ensuring that the platform worked for us.” -Greg Fox, Development Director
“Alasco has made managing real-life budgets so much easier,” explains Greg. Now that the team has an up-to-date account of how much has been spent on each project and invoices are all stored and easy to access in one place. “It has also fed into our risk committee reports,” adds Kirsten, “because we’re able to see how close we are to budget and how budgets are changing over time.”
“It has also fed into our risk committee reports. We’re able to see how close we are to budget and how budgets are changing over time.” - Kirsten Damant, Development Analyst
“We have saved a significant amount of time in the region of 45% to 50% in respect of producing cost reports and comparing actual to budget. Alasco has also enabled us to improve the payment process.” - Greg Fox, Development Director
Curlew Capital is a privately-owned, UK-based Investment and Development Management firm specialising in Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA).
