Westminster Savings Credit Union Makes Smart Investment in Sage 500 ERP

• Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

Westminster Savings Credit Union, one of Canada’s largest credit unions, was in need of a sophisticated and powerful financial management solution that could support both International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) reporting. The credit union had been using another Sage solution, Sage PFW ERP, which worked well for the company for nearly 15 years. However, changing business conditions prompted a change in technology for the credit union. In addition, the credit union was faced with the mandate to produce its financial statements in the newer IFRS format. During the transition period, they were required to produce their financial statements in the existing GAAP format and in the new IFRS format. This necessitated a powerful and flexible accounting solution to help them meet this requirement.

Westminster Saving Credit Union (Westminster Savings) is a financial institution that provides a full range of personal, commercial, and wealth management services. It is one of Canada’s largest credit unions, with 12 branches, 50,000 members and more than $2.1 billion in assets. The credit union has exacting requirements for their financial management software to meet its rigorous accounting and financial reporting needs. Westminster Savings encompasses two legal corporate entities, each with various branches, divisions, and departments. The credit union offers financial products including term deposits and savings accounts in U.S. dollars and maintains cash accounts in pounds sterling and euro currency in addition to Canadian dollars.

Westminster Savings migrated from Sage PFW ERP to Sage 500 ERP, a fully integrated financial management solution with a user-friendly design. The data conversion was managed successfully by the Sage business partner who also built import utilities that bring data from the credit union’s banking, leasing, and payroll software systems into Sage 500 ERP. This integration allows the credit union to operate much more efficiently. Westminster Savings also makes use of two other Sage software solutions, Sage Fixed Assets and Sage Active Planner, both of which integrate with Sage 500 ERP. Sage Fixed Assets helps the credit union track their assets accurately, and it automatically creates the journal entries in Sage 500 ERP. Sage Active Planner is a powerful planning tool that makes it much easier to project costs and create accurate budgets using the data from the General Ledger module.

• Scalable, reliable SQL database increases processing speed for high volume transactions.
• Integration with other critical applications drives efficiency.
• The ability to share data between the systems helps the credit union operate much more efficiently.

• Efficiency improvement: Saving a half day's work each month due to no longer having to maintain offline spreadsheets for currency conversion.