When Centacare Ballarat outgrew the capabilities of its PC-based accounting software package, it sought a financials application with robustness, flexibility and familiarity. To manage and control its 60 separate cost centres, the Catholic social service organisation chose Microsoft Dynamics NAV, installed and supported by Melbourne-based national ERP software specialist Evolution Business Systems (EBS).

Business problem

Centacare Ballarat is a complex organisation.

With more than 220 employees, 13 offices and a multi-million-dollar annual budget, the Victorian-based Catholic social service organisation is funded by both Federal and State governments to support specific activities. Its wide range of disciplines includes homeless support, advocacy for aged housing, mental health and drug rehabilitation programs, marriage counselling programs and employment services.

Epitomising this complexity, Centacare Ballarat operates 60 different cost centres within its $16 million budget, reflecting different funding programs and agencies, each of which have rigorous reporting requirements.

Additionally, Centacare often pays expenses on behalf of its clients, which means that its accounting system has to maintain records for more than 3300 suppliers.

Early in 2010, Centacare Ballarat recognised that its existing accounting software was no longer meeting its needs. A major limitation was MYOB’s inability to load budgets for each cost centre. To prepare monthly reports, data had to be exported to third party software, a process that could take all night, especially as the data file grew in size near the end of the financial year. Sometimes, this process even crashed during the overnight export.

While MYOB had a wide range of reports, these did not meet the specific needs of a Not For Profit organisation like Centacare Ballarat and could not be modified. The software also had poor network performance and crashed on a regular basis, requiring all users to log out of the system in order to restart it.

Centacare Ballarat finance manager Antony Rucco said the organisation’s requirements had exceeded the capabilities of the software. “Clearly, it was no longer meeting our needs,” he said.

Technology solution

Primary drivers for Centacare Ballarat moving to a new financial system were its need for improved reporting, better network performance and a chart of accounts structure that better aligned with its operational structure.
Mr. Rucco said Centacare Ballarat had examined available financial solutions and sought recommendations about service providers. “There are quite a few good domestic and international products available,” he said.

“One of the reasons for choosing Microsoft Dynamics NAV is that we use a Microsoft platform here. We have a SharePoint intranet; we use the Office suite and Windows. It has a common look, touch and feel with other Microsoft products, which people were familiar with.

“Microsoft Dynamics NAV requires an SQL database engine, which we already had for other programs, so it fitted seamlessly into our infrastructure with no tweaking required. Also, a lot of our configuration requirements were met easily by Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

“A key point is that we didn’t want to be locked into something with a high total cost of ownership: Microsoft Dynamics NAV compares very favourably with other programs in terms of total cost of ownership.”

Mr. Rucco said Centacare Ballarat selected Evolution Business Systems (EBS) as its preferred provider based on recommendations and EBS’ professional reputation. “We wanted access to a company that was large enough to meet our needs, yet small enough to be responsive,” he said

“EBS has been great to work with and delivered the NAV project on budget and one month earlier than first planned. Due to a concerted team effort on both sides and a sound, structured implementation methodology, the project achieve a best-case ‘go live’, which reduced the original implementation time by one third. This significantly reduced the disruption of the changeover and gave us access to a better system quicker.”

Business benefits

Mr. Rucco said major benefits of Microsoft Dynamics NAV were its robustness, its flexibility and its ability to streamline business processes. “For a start, it is very robust,” he said.
“Previously, we had problems with MYOB sessions disappearing, which could happen a couple of times a week, forcing everyone to log out. Now, we simply don’t have this application instability occurring, which has saved us a lot of downtime.

“The data and reports in Microsoft Dynamics NAV are very logical and intuitive for finance people and the system has a great search function. It is very easy to export Microsoft Dynamics NAV data to Excel or PDF and it’s simple to manipulate the data. We can also import and export budgets directly with Microsoft Dynamics NAV very easily which has saved us many manual hours of manipulation and configuration of data . A nice feature is we can do sensitivity analyses – creating ‘what if’ scenarios.

“Our accounts people are settled in with the new software and find that it’s better to use than the previous application. The system is bedded down now, but we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with it.”

Mr. Rucco said the streamlined business processes enabled by Microsoft Dynamics NAV had led to greater responsiveness from the Finance department. “Our month-end reporting process, which used to take 10-12 days to finalise, is now completed in half this time,” he said.

“This improvement allows us to distribute reports electronically to our Finance committee before their meeting, which gives them time to consider the reports and formulate advice to the board.

“By streamlining processes and saving time keying in data, Microsoft Dynamics NAV has given Finance more time to focus on value-added activities for other people in the organisation rather than just count the beans.”

Mr. Rucco said he would feel comfortable recommending Evolution Business Systems to other Not For Profit organisations. “They are starting to build up quite a good portfolio of Not For Profit clients,” he said.

“They have good industry experience and have developed a good understanding of the needs and challenges of Not For Profit organisations.”

Story by Impress Media, full article here

More on Dynamics NAV here

More on Evolution Business Systems here

The Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV Role Tailored client enables you to attach a note to any record in the application. For example, if you have extra information about a sales order or a question for a colleague you can write a note.

This note will be available on the sales order window for you and any of your colleagues to look at the sales order. You can have the note appear as a notification on your colleague’s Role Centre – or even on your own Role Centre, as a reminder.

When you or your colleague reads the notification, they can open the sales order just by double-clicking the notification.

In the My Notifications part, highlighted in green above, you can see notes that your colleagues have sent to you. You can click on a note to open the document that the message is related to. On list places and tasks pages you can add and use notes in much the same way as on a Role Centre.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 is a business management solution that works the way people do. Easy-to-use Role Centres give everyone in your organisation new ways to organise work and prioritise relevant tasks, increasing productivity and effectiveness.

Breakthrough Role Centres Boost Productivity

Based on research into the way people really work, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 delivers simplified access to RoleTailored views and business processes – giving your employees an appealing, easy-to-navigate window into their work world.

Out of the box, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 delivers 21 Role Centres optimised for different key employee functions. Working with your Microsoft Dynamics Certified Partner, you can customize Role Centres or create new ones that meet specific business and industry needs.

Fuel Business Agility and Growth

Meet changing business needs without disrupting your operations or your IT budget. Working with flexible, three-tier architecture, your partner can extend or adapt Microsoft Dynamics NAV and add more users efficiently and cost-effectively.

A Sound Investment for Your Business

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 can give you the right solution, at the right price, and the support you need to focus on building your business, rather on your technology systems.

To find out more please click here or call Paul Woods on 1300 303 973.