Case Study: Halton Borough Council automates 80,000 invoices and accelerates procurement with Unit4 Financial Planning & Analysis

Staff and citizens come first with an agile and adaptive Unit4 finance system

Halton Borough Council is a people-focused local authority serving about 130,000 citizens. The council relied on fragmented, overlapping finance processes that made it hard to get an accurate, timely view of operations, slowing decision-making and consuming staff time with repetitive manual tasks—previously processing roughly 95,000 invoices by hand each year.

By implementing the adaptive Unit4 ERP, Halton unified finance, procurement and income management into a single, self-service platform with automated workflows and real-time reporting. The system now automates around 80,000 invoices annually (cutting manual processing to ~15,000), reduced purchase order turnaround from days to hours, improved procurement visibility and payments handling, and freed staff to focus on delivering better citizen services; the platform is also shared with neighboring councils to drive further efficiency.

Halton Borough Council

Gaynor Bullock

ERP System Principle Officer