One of Twinfield's most significant stories in the Irish market is working with an organization called IPOS. IPOS is an acronym that means Independent Pharmacy Ownership Scheme. The organization helps local pharmacists purchase their own shops on a 15 year plan. The pharmacist takes control of the shop, which is co-owned with IPOS, but as well as finance, the organization provides direct support to them as a retailer in the form of help from a Business Manager. The other key ingredient to the formula, as well as helping sustain locally managed pharmacies in the community, is that IPOS can group the buying power of their 150 shop network to give product discounts.

The IPOS challenge was to gather consolidated management information from these 150 community pharmacies, which are each run as an individual business, and to provide a bookkeeping service to these pharmacies. Of course the Twinfield environment is ideal for this kind of "franchise style" operation requiring replicated accounting solutions that can each be managed locally, as well as being consolidated and analysed centrally.

Shane Connors, the IPOS Chief Financial Officer said:

"We are constantly looking for ways to add value to our business and increase operational efficiency. In this respect, the only thing simpler than the Twinfield solution was the decision to incorporate it into our business model."

Twinfield's longstanding partner in Ireland, Proact Solutions, have been working with IPOS to streamline processes and systems across budgeting, the accounting system and management accounts, across over 150 pharmacies, and with multiple service providers. Twinfield helps automate the bookkeeping tasks by interfacing with other key business applications, reducing data entry and potential mistakes. The interfaces include importing bank statements, and producing payment files from the accounting system to pay suppliers. They import data from their payroll systems, as well as importing invoices from the largest suppliers.

Compared to their old accounting system, IPOS now gets timely management information to enable better decision making. They now have one single data source for reporting, and so Shane knows he as "one version of the truth!". People can be redeployed from report production, and so producers become consumers! The aim of all of this is to make management information available more quickly and in more detail, allowing any analysis required, by individual shop or across shops. From Shane's comments, the streamlined Twinfield solution is a real success.