Hāpaitia has been able to streamline accounting processes across seven organisations, enable outcome-based dimensional reporting, and meet government security standards with the implementation of cloud-based Sage Intacct with the BES team.
The Company
Hāpaitia, the shared services organisation for six Workforce Development Councils, provides IT, human resources and finance support to approximately a team of 320 people based all over New Zealand.
The Challenge
Hāpaitia faced challenges with their previous financial management and services solution which lacked adequate internal controls and was unable to handle the complexity and integration needs of larger organisations. The Chief Financial Officer at Hāpaitia, Leanne Milligan said that their previous system couldn’t cope with the number of employees and tiers of management that they required.
“Our previous solution was great for small businesses, but it just couldn’t cope with the complexity that we drove to it. We also couldn’t integrate it overly well with our budgeting and forecasting system”.
Adherence to both NZ Government and internal IT security and access control standards was another key challenge for Hāpaitia.
The Solution
In searching for a new solution, their main focus was finding a solution capable of accommodating multi-tier management levels. They needed a user-friendly system that addressed key pain points around approvals, plus they required a receipting system - a key internal control. In looking for a solution they went out to six different companies, but they chose to work with Business Enabling Systems (BES) who proposed the Sage Intacct solution.
BES’ offering through Sage Intacct stood out due to its ability to fulfil critical needs, its unique dimensional reporting feature, enabling outcome-based reporting and analysis across multiple dimensions – and its competitive pricing,
“One of the key things that we really liked about the Sage Intacct solution was the ability to do dimensional reporting,” confirms Leanne. “You can look at all your data by cost centre or expense type, and for a lot of non-profit or government sector organisations that’s important because they want ‘outcome-based reporting’ and that’s not a standard operation for a lot of systems”.
Hāpaitia has several dimensions that they use because they want to cut their data in multiple ways. They look at their expenditure by who they’re engaging with; they also look at it by which industry or region they are engaging with so that they can improve things for the regions they support.
“Dimensional accounting allows us to do that,” explains Leanne. “We can go in through our system and say we want to look at all our expenditure. Currently, we’ve got five dimensions set up that we can look at our data on. Now, most conventional systems just can't do that. So, that was one of the big selling points for the Sage product.”
Other benefits of Sage Intacct, according to Leanne, were that the basic system functionality is strong and it’s great at doing the basics well. However, it’s the system’s customisability and flexibility that really made it stand out to Hāpaitia, especially as they’re accounting for seven organisations.
“We wanted the ability to look at each organisation individually and control access individually, but then also - because we're a single entity supporting seven - not have to go in and out of each organisation’s system all the time. We can run the system from our level but can still see everything and everyone at the same time."
“This is huge because our admin counterparts in the different workforce development councils can only see their system. So, that approach was very important to us as well.”
The Results
Sage Intacct is also able to integrate well with Hāpaitia’s other applications. The organisation implemented an expense management system at the same time as setting up Sage Intacct. With their previous system, it couldn't integrate overly well with their budgeting and forecasting system – Workday Adaptive, whereas now they have all the Sage Intacct data flowing nicely.
In addition to the successful integration with Workday Adaptive, Hāpaitia leverages several other integrations to optimise its accounting practices. They use Certify for expense claim management and Pacifictech AP Automation including invoice recognition. With these integrations in place, Hāpaitia can effectively streamline their accounting processes, empower decision-making, and drive success across all their organisations.
“Sometimes you’ll get a system that tries to covers a lot of areas, and you’ll often find that you'll get some aspects that are really good and others that are not so good. Because you can integrate applications to Sage Intacct so effectively, it means you can get the best-of-breed in all areas. So, that was also a plus for us - that we could effectively plug on an integrated expense management system that was, in my opinion, a best-in-class,” says Leanne.
“We've got kaimahi (employees) based all over New Zealand. All of our IT systems are cloud-based. We needed a proper cloud-based system to fit with all of that as well. It had to pass muster with our IT manager as far as controls and access controls are concerned. We use a single sign-on access for all our systems here. One of the key things that our IT system had to have was single sign-on access.”
With Sage Intacct, that means that when Leanne and her team log on to their system in the morning, they can now access all the applications with the single sign-on. Hāpaitia is a taxpayer-funded organisation that adheres to government best practice when it comes to security. To meet their IT requirements, they needed to ensure that Sage Intacct could reach government standards. BES worked with Hāpaitia to ensure that Sage Intacct had the appropriate controls to be used in the government sector.
Leanne appreciated the strong support from BES’ New Zealand-based team in getting the system up and running, delivering the project to spec, on time and on budget. “BES is a really great team. I've dealt with them before and knowing that we have good New Zealand based support is important. This is my third system I've put in with Brendon and my second one with Jamie. They know what my expectations are and they're just easy to work with.”
Satisfaction
When it comes to recommending Sage Intacct and BES, Leanne doesn’t hesitate - “If you’re looking for a flexible, modern system that's got a great support team behind it, Sage Intacct and BES would definitely be worth looking at. Thanks to the way the actual basic structure of the programme works, the system can cope with fairly large organisations as well. You could run it over a multi-divisional organisation because it consolidates really easily. I think it's got huge potential. Sage Intacct's got a lot going for it.
Everyone's relatively happy, and I think that's a good thing in its own right - that we can put a new system in that completely takes away the old system and we did it in three months flat. Plus, we trained everybody in that time too!”
