Focus Ireland

Founded in 1985, Focus Ireland is committed to providing essential services to homeless people in Ireland, with housing projects across Dublin, Waterford, Kilkenny, Cork, Sligo and Limerick. Not only does Focus provide advice and support for finding housing, but the organisation advocates for homeless people, ensuring their rights remain on the social and political agenda. Helping thousands of individuals and families avoid homelessness or find a home every year, the work carried out by Focus is underpinned by the organisation’s core values which include advocating for social justice, empowering customers to be self-sufficient and delivering quality services, all while keeping the dignity of customers at the heart of operations. 

Having grown significantly in the last 3 years, the finance function had outgrown its existing ERP software with system limitations becoming increasingly apparent. Processes were quite labor-intense and involved a lot of tedious manual work, which is hard to manage at scale. The legacy system offered limited reporting functionality which meant time-consuming manual processes affected the quality and timeliness of information used by managers to make important decisions.

Focus Ireland partnered with Storm Technology to implement Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Business Central, a solution that would help transform financial operations within the organisation by consolidating financial data, reducing an over-reliance on manual processes, optimising reporting and enhancing employee experience. The Business Central solution was further enhanced with the integration of Continia Document Capture to automate invoice processing, as well as Continia Expense Management to accelerate expense approvals, and Solver, which offers advanced budget and reporting functionality.