Taking traditional to high-tech

Pastel has put the 25 000 strong membership of the Imbalenhle Burial Society just a
cellphone away from their policies – boosting customer service as well as profits.

The Imbalenhle Burial Society, the Stokvel Company’s Best Stokvel and Burial Society of 2008, uses innovative Pastel features to improve its service. Through Pastel’s integrated SMS and accounting solution, the society managed to automate member management and administrative activities, and reduce costs.

So effective is Imbalenhle’s use of the solution that it can manage the administration of 25 000 individual policies, R2 million in monthly revenues and some R700 000 worth of monthly payouts with a staff of only five.

The benefits of going high-tech

This is because Imbalenhle lets its members use SMSes to check balances or verify policy numbers. The system also automatically generates SMSes for outstanding payments and lapsed policies.

Whenever Imbalenhle CEO Eric Mathethwa is out of office or at the society’s Durban branch, he logs on to Pastel Partner via his cellphone. “Because burial societies were seen as traditional, conservative organisations, unlike a formal business, the whole idea of using business tools to run them has taken time to sink in,” Mathethwa says.

“We use Pastel because we want to support our members by making it easy for them to work with us. It gives us the most cost-effective means of achieving that.”

The 21-year old company made the switch from manual administration to Pastel Partner. “We integrated Imbalenhle’s membership database with Partner rather than just using it as an accounting system,” says Jabulani Mabuza of Pastel’s channel partner, Absolute Accounting. “That’s because the package lets us simplify member and policy management by categorising members by premium. A member can immediately see what his income and expenditure is by category, and our admin staff can easily pick up whose premium payments are outstanding.”

Making it easy for members

Unlike other burial societies that pay out an average lump sum, Pastel allows Imbalenhle to give a breakdown of monthly premiums to its current insurance partner Sanlam. “Members and their families can therefore see exactly how their money has worked for them. That transparency is just one of the things that puts Imbalenhle in a league of its own,” said Mathethwa.

Imbalenhle has achieved additional operational efficiencies by using Partner to interface with external systems like SMS Portal, EasyPay, and ABSA Cash Focus. “We download bank and EasyPay files and the application matches references and generates a Pastel receipt batch and sends an SMS to thank the client for the payment,” he said.

Members can even pay their premiums via the EasyPay system at supermarkets and Partner has been customised to instantly allocate those payments.

“None of this would have been possible without Pastel Partner,” Mabuza says. “It allowed Imbalenhle to migrate with minimum effort and knowledge of accounting from a manually run business aimed at the unbanked to automated administration of a business at the cutting edge of technology that will effortlessly bring the unbanked into the formal economy.”