Healthy planning: How RACGP transformed their budgeting process

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) represents more than 40,000 members. Its mission is to improve the health and wellbeing of all people in Australia by supporting GPs, general practice registrars and medical students. This is done primarily through education, training, research, assessment, professional development and developing standards that ensure high quality healthcare.

Complexities causing planning challenges

RACGP was using a budgeting tool that was not well designed, causing complexities for finance and making it difficult for the wider business to adopt.

The tool could only plan 12 months at a time, so it was impossible to create multi-year plans. It was also separate from the Excel spreadsheets used for calculations, so it was hard to view context for numbers.

To change this, RACGP wanted to rebuild their planning process with a different tool.

They needed a budgeting and planning solution that was:

• Fit-for-purpose, dynamic and customisable
• Easy for both finance professionals and the wider business to use

A flexible solution that brought finance and business together

The finance team could then build a budget with informed driver-based assumptions, then test it with the business who could easily see what the different changes meant.

With Workday Adaptive Planning, RACGP were able to successfully model out the financial impact of the change in exam timings and have all the underlying budget assumptions together in one central location to constantly review and update.

They can also model key income streams based on drivers and flex up and down on those streams.

Business collaboration and ownership

A big contributor to increased business collaboration is the platform’s user-friendliness.

Once key components are set up by the finance team, business users can easily contribute to it.

You do not need to be a finance trained person to understand the input sheets; it is a controlled environment where formulas do not break or change.

At the same time, the Workday Adaptive Planning interface looks and feels like an Excel sheet, bringing a sense of familiarity and comfort to the users.

This has made it easier for business users to contribute to the budget and be more engaged in the planning process.

While it took 5-6 clicks to get to a figure before, it now takes just 2.

Anyone with permissions can always see their numbers and the context. Rather than relying on the finance team to build the budget and be responsible for it, there is now a greater sense of ownership from the business.

Finance as a trusted advisor

The Adaptive Planning solution has driven more conversation between finance and the business.

Instead of numbers in silos, the budget is really a plan for the organisation as a whole.

They have been able to discuss what drove the numbers in previous years, and how to best craft the budget going forward.

This has also changed the way finance is viewed by the business. Rather than just number crunchers, finance is now seen as trusted advisors.

This is especially so with COVID-19 where businesses were relying a lot more on the finance team to provide meaningful data and understand business impacts in unpredictable and fast-changing environments.

An easy tool – for finance and the business

While having Workday Adaptive Planning has made budgeting easier for the business, it has made things more effortless for the finance team as well.

After QMetrix provided training and ideas on how to use the software for reporting and visualisations, the RACGP finance team were able to operate it themselves, leveraging QMetrix to advise, review and help deploy.

This meant RACGP had the opportunity to become self-sufficient and confident using the software, while also keeping to the project budget.

As an example of ease, with COVID-19 the organisation reduced travel budget across the board. Instead of having to reduce it in every sheet, they did it in a central spot, saving time and effort.

Workday Adaptive Planning was implemented before COVID-19, and this has given RACGP the flexibility to do budgets remotely while working together more seamlessly.

One finance business partner who joined just as the organisation decided staff were to work from home, was able to easily engage in the budgeting process straight away because of Adaptive Planning – without the need for sending spreadsheets back and forth.

Impact for RACGP

• All-in-one financial planning tool. With access to underlying assumptions, the business can understand their numbers better
• Accurate budgeting based on actual drivers rather than guesstimates
• User-friendly tool for both finance and business users, which also allows for easier collaboration
• Greater business participation and ownership – the budget is not just the responsibility of finance
• Finance is no longer seen as just number crunchers, but as strategic and trusted business advisors