The Client
Sightsavers is an international third sector organisation, who work tirelessly to prevent avoidable blindness and to support people with visual impairments in over thirty countries worldwide.
Their Challenge
Due to our success on previous projects and our close working relationship with them, Sightsavers approached us with a unique challenge.
They needed us to create a system which they and country partners could use to set up agreements and budgets for the global mapping of trachoma (a bacterial eye infection), and then make claims against them. The claims could then be output to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) who funded the project, for eventual release of payment.
Like all of their other systems, CLAIMS would eliminate the error-prone spreadsheet-based procedures originally put in place to create a centralised source of data.
Our Solution
We developed and deployed the CLAIMS system for Sightsavers, which now lets them keep track of all their partners, agreements and budgets. It features detailed reporting so that Sightsavers can monitor the mapping project’s progress.
Partners can log in and create the budgets, which are then reviewed and approved by the Sightsavers team. Claims made against these budgets are also put through the approval workflow, meaning that there is no falsified data in the system.
The Benefits
With a single centralised system, all partners submit their budgets/claims using the same in-system template and so avoid the hazards of multiple error-prone spread sheets or local interpretation. This also makes it easier for reporting.
The solid workflow budget/claim approval process removes the potential for errors, meaning operations are slick and streamlined. It provides an audit trail for Sightsavers, so they can easily provide full reports of financial data to the project funder, DFID. The framework for CLAIMS has since been rolled out for other Sightsavers projects, funded by a number of different beneficiaries.