Before modernising, Australian Childhood Foundation faced manual reporting bottlenecks and version control risks across its growing spreadsheet network. Partnering with QMetrix to deploy Workday Adaptive Planning provided a single source of truth, automated complex personnel modelling, and slashed their annual budget cycle from three months to five weeks.
The Australian Childhood Foundation is a non-profit organisation with a vision to see all children safe from the trauma of abuse, violence and neglect. They operate across six states, providing support for children and young people affected by family violence and sexual abuse.
Context and challenges
Prior to transforming their financial operations, the Australian Childhood Foundation used Microsoft Excel as their primary platform for budgeting and forecasting.
As the foundation grew over the years, Excel was no longer fit for purpose.
Generating monthly reports required intense manual spreadsheet maintenance, leaving the finance team vulnerable to broken formulas, version control issues, and lengthy wait times for data to refresh.
They wanted a solution that would serve the business needs better and help them be more efficient.
Their key goals were to reduce reliance on Excel, eliminate inefficient reporting, have a single source of truth, and generate more meaningful business intelligence on demand, which would in turn, inform decision making to a greater degree.
They also wanted to reduce information silos and monitor company performance in a more modern manner.
The solution: Workday Adaptive Planning
Recognising the need for a dedicated Financial Planning and Analysis solution, the finance team embarked on market research, evaluating several platforms before selecting Workday Adaptive Planning – a leader in the Gartner quadrant.
From the early stages, they worked with implementation partner QMetrix, who provided support for building their business case and understanding how the solution could work for their unique business.
The deployment has since transformed how Australian Childhood Foundation manages its planning across several core areas.
Seamless ERP integration and a single source of truth
One of the first steps was to integrate their existing ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, with Workday Adaptive Planning.
Actuals are now securely imported and completely refreshed across all reports in under a minute. It establishes a definitive single source of truth across actuals, budgets and forecasts, giving the team confidence in data integrity while eliminating spreadsheet version control risks.
Information can be easily viewed in Adaptive Planning, even drilling through to specific transaction details.
Agile personnel and program modelling
With labour representing the majority of costs, establishing a robust personnel model was vital. The model needed to be able to budget and forecast staffing levels across a variety of different funding arrangements and time periods ranging from months to years.
The way this was built and calculated in Adaptive Planning now allows them to accurately and more easily model and forecast staffing requirements for each program.
They have the capability to drill down into different aspects of it, and highlight the performance of each separate program. They are also able to automate complex calculations for operational benchmarks including margins, cost per FTE, revenue per FTE, and cost variances.
Once configured, these formulas carry forward across multiple years and versions.
Additionally, the system provided a flexible engine to handle complex corporate cost allocation rules, pushing internal overheads down to specific business units while accommodating unique organisational exceptions.
Streamlined reporting and analytics
The finance team were using Jet Reports, which required a lot of spreadsheet work and month-to-month maintenance.
Now with Adaptive Planning, they have master reports and dashboards, from which they build out further variations.
The information can be refreshed based on live data – a big difference from when they used to email static reports which were just a snapshot at one point in time.
Russell Griffiths, Financial Business Analyst, says, “The great benefit of Adaptive Planning is you can self-serve information. Department managers can drill up and down to get a true understanding of what is affecting their numbers, and it has empowered them to take greater ownership of their budgets.
“The executive team also has similar advantages. They can look at the whole organisation and assess how things are going, and focus on improvement areas quickly. It’s far more efficient and effective”.
A budget that is 3x faster, and more frequent forecasts
The efficiency gains achieved by the finance team have been massive. Previously, an annual budget would take at least 3 months; the process would have to start in February to meet the June deadline.
With Adaptive Planning, the finance team were able to build, finalise and secure Board approval in a short five weeks. The process started in April and was completed by May.
Additionally, they can run more frequent forecasts instead of the cumbersome half-yearly Excel forecasts. Actuals are migrated into the system with ease, allowing daily forecast updates as new information emerges.
In fact, because the budget finished early, the finance team started focusing on the next forecast before the new financial year had even started.
The changing role of finance, and the importance of having a good partner
Russell says, “Having Adaptive Planning has absolutely freed up my time to look at different things, develop new reports, and it’s so much quicker to disseminate information.
“It is a really strong, recognised product that is flexible and could do what we needed it to. With QMetrix, we generated models to help with budgeting and forecasting, and reduce the load of doing that. The benefits for the whole organisation are clear.
“Implementing an FP&A solution is an investment everyone has to consider. But once you weigh up the pros and cons and return on investment, particularly with a system like Adaptive Planning, then it becomes clear that you cannot afford not to do it”.
Russell highlights that partnering with QMetrix from early stages was a good decision. It was beneficial having a highly responsive, local team, as well as strong project management. Project objectives, hours and costs were monitored tightly from start to finish, with regular communication from expert consultants who delivered the project on time and on budget.
“When you go on this discovery phase you don’t necessarily know everything from your research. It was good to have the support of QMetrix, particularly because they had experience with many other not-for-profits. They listened to what we needed and provided support, even from their executive team, assisting to get the business case agreed and providing several demonstrations. We’ve established a healthy partnership over time, and that’s why we’re now in phase 2 with them.”
– Russell Griffiths, Financial Business Analyst
Key impacts and benefits for Australian Childhood Foundation
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