City & Country on course for greater efficiencies

Essex-based heritage development specialist City & Country Group has selected COINS to replace all of its existing business systems, in order to drive efficiencies through enhanced and better integrated internal processes.

City & Country selected COINS after a review of options and an analysis of the potential benefits. Residential Finance Director, Mark Fowler comments: “Having used COINS in previous employment, I already knew that it delivers a high quality software solution for residential developers and is supported by a team of people with expert knowledge in how our industry operates.”

City & Country plan to implement the large majority of COINS back-office solutions as well as the specialist home builder modules. The first phase of implementation commenced in May 2011 and includes financial ledgers, procurement, VAP and CVR. Further phases will see the implementation of House Sales, Customer Care, Residential Lettings, Forecasting and Land Appraisal.

The implementation will include the deployment of several custom-built workflows that will support processes for procurement management and property sales.

Fowler continues: “ We have identified a variety of important benefits that will be derived from the COINS project: More flexible, simpler Group financial consolidated reporting; the eradication of numerous excel spreadsheets holding important business information that cannot be shared effectively and is insecure; More effective integrated ledger processes for all of our businesses; Consolidated payment runs; One consolidated COINS House Sales Workbench will be used to manage sales activity for all developments, units, purchasers and marketing leads. Contract based security can be utilised to limit access by development, as may be necessary for individual users of the database. This will make our management of sales far more efficient and should drive improvements in effectiveness in this key area.”