As a children’s education charity that works in more than 20 of the world’s lowest-income countries, Street Child’s financial systems have historically been a patchwork of disconnected tools.
Some country offices used QuickBooks, while others relied on spreadsheets. Even when the same software appeared across locations, it was configured differently in each.
But since the charity manages multimillion-dollar grants across Africa and Asia, this setup proved a challenge.
“Finance systems simply weren’t a priority,” said Dave Smeath, senior manager of program finance and operations at Street Child. “That’s quite common in charities that start small and grow quickly.”
The organization, which has reached over 1.5 million children and supported over 1,000 schools across the globe to date, has since undergone a digital overhaul of its financial systems.
After implementing Aqilla, a cloud-based accounting platform, Street Child can now track every transaction in real time, from a box of pens purchased in South Sudan to contractor fees for school construction in Somalia.
According to the firm, this shift comes as charities face pressure to demonstrate financial accountability — particularly following cuts to overseas aid by major donor nations. These organizations need to prove expenditure against every fund while finding efficiencies to recover overhead costs.
“We have to prove every penny we spend,” Smeath said.
The complexity challenge
Street Child, headquartered in the U.K., operates in 15 countries through both its own offices and local partners. The charity has grown through both organic expansion and mergers, including a 2019 merger with Lessons for Life that first introduced the organization to Aqilla.
This growth created financial reporting challenges that exceeded the capabilities of off-the-shelf tools. According to Smeath, working with large institutional donors, including U.N. agencies, requires granular tracking of how every dollar is spent, often broken down by specific budget lines such as transportation, materials or contractor fees.
“As we started working with larger donors and managing bigger grants, the reporting requirements became much more demanding,” Smeath said.
“We needed consistency, transparency and the ability to report across projects, donors, countries and legal entities — all at once.”
Street Child worked closely with Aqilla’s consultants to customize the system, starting with East African offices including Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan before expanding across the organization.
Real-time visibility
The cloud-based system allows Street Child’s finance team to monitor operations as they happen rather than waiting for monthly reports. Local teams post transactions in their own currencies, which Aqilla automatically converts to British pounds using donor-approved exchange rates.
“I can check Cameroon’s data in the morning and coach the team through any changes we need to make on the same day,” Smeath said. “Aqilla allows us to spot issues before they become problems.”
The system tags every transaction with donor, project and budget-line codes, enabling automated reporting that accounts for restricted funds earmarked for specific purposes and unrestricted donations that can be used more flexibly.
Receipts and invoices attach directly to transactions — a feature Smeath said is invaluable during audits.
“If an auditor asks for evidence of a £5 stationery purchase in South Sudan, I can pull up the receipt from a shop in Juba within seconds,” he said.
This is especially vital as Smeath said some of Street Child’s largest donors will disallow costs, withhold funding or eliminate future grants if organizations cannot provide the required documentation and reporting.
Collaborative development
Hugh Scantlebury, Aqilla’s chief executive and founder, said Street Child actively collaborates on software development, providing input on features that benefit the broader nonprofit sector.
“Street Child is the best kind of customer,” Scantlebury said. “They’re proactive and ready to work with us on developing new features for the benefit of the sector as a whole.”
Recent collaborative projects include refinements to handle rounding variances in high-denomination currencies and enhancements to prevent miscoding. The organizations are now exploring artificial intelligence applications, including AI-driven business rules that could flag potential coding errors before transactions are posted.
Chris Tredwell, Aqilla’s chief operating officer, said the company views AI as a tool rather than a headline feature, particularly given the audit requirements and trust expectations in financial systems.
“We’re not adding AI just to say we have it — it has to genuinely improve outcomes for finance teams,” Tredwell said.
Smeath values the responsive support, citing an instance when he emailed the company for technical assistance and received a solution before midday the same day.
“Being able to reach someone who knows your setup really well and get a quick resolution is invaluable,” he said.
Growth enabler
For Smeath, who has worked in finance for nearly 25 years — including more than a decade in international development — robust financial systems directly enable organizational growth and impact.
Before implementing Aqilla, Street Child struggled with forecasting and cash flow management. The organization often wouldn’t have a clear picture of income or expenditure until after year-end, creating risks when many projects require prefinancing.
“If funds land in a country office today, we know about it immediately,” Smeath said. “That kind of up-to-date information simply wasn’t possible before, and it fundamentally changes how we manage risk and plan activity.”
The financial capabilities also unlock access to larger institutional funding that requires sophisticated reporting systems. For charities, Smeath said, growth translates directly to impact.
“Strong financial reporting enables us to access larger grants, which means we can support more children, keep more of them in school and deliver better outcomes,” he said.
The system has transformed month-end close from a time-consuming process into what Smeath describes as smooth and error-free. Finance teams now spend less time fixing entries and more time providing forward-looking analysis to support strategic decisions.
Working remotely from Spain, Smeath said the cloud platform makes geography irrelevant.
“I live in Spain, but it doesn’t matter where I am — I can log in and work with our teams, see their finances and check accounting in South Sudan if I need to,” he said. “It’s like all our offices are in the same room.”