Civic Square
Reimagining finance & accounts for purpose-led organisation Civic Square.
Civic Square is a community interest company with a bold approach to visioning, building & investing in civic infrastructure for neighbourhoods of the future. Looking for an accountant with a design-led ethos, they approached us to help them transform what they do.
Demystifying finance & accounts
When we began working with Civic Square in 2020, they were afraid of accounting. They came to us from a traditional accountant who hadn’t explained things to them in a way they could understand.
As a result, the world of finance and accounting was daunting and they lacked the knowledge they needed to truly understand what was happening in their organisation.
Our role was to help Civic Square properly understand the finances of their business and how their organisation worked from a finance point of view.
In 2021, they bid for funding and received it for their project, Bloc Party. This was a year-long project all about stripping the business back and building it up from the ground. We wanted to rethink and reimagine finance and the role of finance within an organisation. This involved going back to basics– what is income and expenditure? How do we record transactions? What’s a P&L and Balance Sheet? How do they interact with one another?
This project enabled them to gain a better understanding of their business and the role finance plays in the organisation. They can now look at a set of accounts and understand what they mean.
As a result, Civic Square became empowered to take control of their finances, learning to understand the figures and use them in a way that made sense to them as a business.
Education & collaboration
As we got to know Civic Square, we quickly realised our values were very well aligned. They were curious about our design background and the service design we had brought to accounting.
As their level of knowledge increased, Civic Square asked more and more insightful questions and we were able to collaborate with them to co-create outputs and reports. Evolving and improving these reports and chairing directors’ meetings on a monthly basis, we implemented a brand new financial system to run their organisation.
As we educated them, Civic Square began asking questions that challenged us on how to use Xero to provide that information. This marked the beginning of a collaborative relationship where we both learned things from each other that would help us continually improve our businesses.
Replacing a one-size-fits-all approach with a bespoke financial system.
When Civic Square first approached us, they were using a standard chart of accounts from their previous accountant that hadn’t been explained to them. Not only did they not understand their systems, but their systems weren’t tailored to them, meaning they were unable to run the reports they needed to as part of the funding process.
Replacing an out-of-the-box Xero setup with a tailored accounting solution, we remodelled Civic Square’s entire accounting system to fit their business.
The Bloc Party project enabled us to redesign the chart of accounts so it was relevant to their business and so it would allow us to do a number of different reporting tasks, including reporting to funders on how they were spending the money.
This bespoke accounting setup meant we could help Civic Square report on their ‘missions’: why they do what they do and their purpose, giving them the richness of information they needed about their organisation and how it works. The result was a total financial transformation, clarity in the numbers and confidence for the way ahead.