Cogent is an established independent international insurance and reinsurance broker situated at the heart of the London insurance market and at Lloyd’s.
Established over 30 years ago, Cogent transacts insurance and reinsurance worldwide across a whole range of business classes, negotiating the broadest coverage at competitive terms with only first-class insurers.
The organisation currently has over 30 employees and a turnover of about £10 million.
As long-standing Sunsystems users, Cogent had previously upgraded from Sun 4 to Sun 6.1 (with Q&A10).
In 2019, impending IT obsolescence necessitated another upgrade. Although the company considers their accounting needs to be straightforward, there is a level of complexity when multi-currency accounting is needed. During their evaluation of alternative accounting software, the superior capability of SunSystems in this area became clear and reinforced the management team’s decision to upgrade to Sun 6.4 and Q&A11.
In conjunction with the upgrade, the organisation also sought to streamline its heavily paper-based manual system of collating employee expenses and chose a third-party software provider to facilitate the electronic capture, processing, and paperless filing of this part of the business.
A further objective was to integrate this software with SunSystems as seamlessly as possible to eliminate the duplication of data input and wasted effort.
After the decision to upgrade, the next step was for Cogent to make a decision on a SunSystems Partner. Though Cogent had previously been with another SunSystems support provider for many years, Cogent’s management team said they were disappointed with the level of support they received from the previous support provider.
“Having reservations about embarking on our expenses integration project with the previous support provider, we felt the time was right to make the change. As a conveniently-located, recommended Infor partner, our first choice was FinanSys. From the outset, we were impressed by their responsiveness and personal service. Their product knowledge and understanding of our situation gave us confidence that our objectives could be achieved professionally and economically.”
FinanSys’ SunSystems professional services team immediately sprung into action with the objective to modernise Cogent’s system and eliminate the data duplication through seamless integration with Cogent’s expense management system.
The result is a paperless system that is capable of handling the most complex of employee expenses, yet easy enough for any employee to use no matter their location.
“Our discussions about modernising employee expenses were productive and insightful. Eschewing the “one size fits all” mentality, FinanSys Consultant Deniz Guyuk took on board the bespoke elements of the build and her expertise delivered an integration which not only fulfilled our expectations but also enhanced the original brief. We have fully digitalised our employee expense capture, processing and filing, saving time and cost and furthermore have been able to perfectly support remote working.”
In a final assessment of the upgrade process and in conclusion of their overall experience with FinanSys, the Cogent project lead said:
We are very satisfied with the service and support we have received from FinanSys during our first year and look forward to developing a long-lasting relationship with them. Working with the FinanSys team was a pleasure. We decided to time our upgrade with the new financial year which unfortunately also coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown. Despite the challenging situation the upgrade to Sun 6.4 and Q&A11 was completed on time and on budget by FinanSys.
Contact us today on +44 (20) 7456 9833 or info@finansys.com
