The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust is using a lease accounting platform and AI-powered document parser to meet the requirements of the Lease Accounting (IFRS 16) Management & Reporting System standards which came into force for NHS organisations last year.
Launched by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) in 2019, IFRS 16 requires lessees to provide significantly more data relating to leases in their balance sheet accounting, and applies to most organisations that use rentals or leasing as a means to obtain access to assets with potentially significant implications for covenants, credit ratings and borrowing costs.
Employing 3,700 staff and serving a local population of around 350,000 people living in west Essex and east Hertfordshire, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust provides a full range of general acute, outpatient and diagnostic services at The Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, the Herts and Essex Hospital in Bishop’s Stortford, and St Margaret’s Hospital in Epping.
Its extended catchment area incorporates a population of up to 500,000 and includes the areas of Hoddesdon, Cheshunt and Broxbourne in Hertfordshire.
The NHS Trust is replacing ts spreadsheet-based process to manage and report on its real estate leases under IFRS 16 with MRI Software's ProLease lease accounting platform.
Samuel Owusu-Ansah, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust's Head of Financial Services, says: “Whilst we do not have a large portfolio of leases, we wanted to set in place an efficient and streamlined process and system from the outset to manage our data centrally and to automate calculations, notifications and disclosure reporting.
Having complete confidence in the accuracy of our lease financials and ability to meet audit requirements
The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust will also leverage a lease abstraction tool from the software developer which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to obtain and validate lease information from documents and transferring it into the lease accounting software.
The NHS trust is also using MRI's Assets4000 capital accounting solutions to record detailed information on more than 4,000 assets consisting largely of land, property, furniture and medical equipment.
Owusu-Ansah says: “It had become an onerous and time-consuming task to track our assets on a spreadsheet that offered only basic functionality.
We required a more robust and automated solution and are excited to be able to manage depreciation calculations and run reports at a click of a button, which will accelerate our month- and year- end procedures considerably.”
“MRI Software’s excellent track record in delivering proven lease and capital accounting software across the public sector made our choice simple, and we are now looking forward to working with the team over the coming weeks to get up and running to ensure full IFRS compliance."
