Rehoboth Christian Ministries works to serve people with disabilities and allow them to flourish in life. Founded in 1976, they began their mission with a single camp in Central Alberta and now support over 50 group homes across the province. Their organization serves the disabled community with continued growth and development opportunities through residential, vocational, and respite services.
With corporate services managing five regional offices, Rehoboth migrated to Sparkrock 365 to manage their human resources (HR), finance, and payroll.
Before switching to Sparkrock, their finance and payroll departments were overwhelmed with manual tasks and disconnected systems. Payroll took 2-3 days to complete due to using paper timesheets, no scheduling solution, and the need to import Excel spreadsheets into their previous finance system.
"We've never not been able to submit our payroll on time to get our employees paid. In all the time we've been with Sparkrock we've never had a problem with getting our payroll done and our financials out to a system we need to have the information."
Janice Gerbrandt
Director of Corporate Services at Rehoboth.
The lack of integration also made reporting a tedious task. Like many nonprofits, Rehoboth must provide regular reports to its board of directors and the government. These reports were time intensive and prone to many errors. One example is source deductions. If this is not done on time or appropriately based on an organization's threshold, this could result in hefty fines. In the past, their organization has admittedly faced penalties for not filing source deductions on time.
They knew their existing system would not scale, so they searched for an ERP system. Their top priority was finding a way to integrate HR, finance, and payroll while reducing the need for manual calculations and human intervention.
Their leadership team created an RFP and looked at five different ERP systems. Ultimately, Sparkrock was able to provide everything Rehoboth needed.
"Sparkrock could give us finance, payroll and HR functionality with one system and make them talk to each other."
Janice Gerbrandt
Director of Corporate Services at Rehoboth.
They successfully migrated to Sparkrock in 2016 before upgrading to Sparkrock 365 in 2022. Sparkrock's partnership with also Microsoft was a key driver in their decision-making process. It allowed them to integrate other Microsoft 365 applications, such as Outlook for email and Microsoft PowerBI, a data visualization platform for advanced reporting. "It's so seamless going from one application to the next. It's all there. You don't need to jump around to get information. Sparkrock took it to another level when partnering with Microsoft as greatly as they did. That made all the difference for us, remarks Gerbrandt."
Sparkrock and their industry experts shared best practices that played a significant role in successfully implementing their software. A critical part of getting your ERP system up and running on time is trusting and relying on the team implementing the system. "There would be times when things wouldn't be working, but we could always count on them to be ready to support us. If they didn't know the answer, they were honest. They would say let us take this away, we'll find an answer, and we'll get this solved. They were diligent, and our relationship with them was invaluable," Gerbrandt says.
Before Sparkrock, the finance team would spend hours getting reports ready. This means Janice and her team were constantly buried in manual tasks instead of focusing on more strategic tasks. With Sparkrock 365 and Microsoft Power BI, the system automatically generates quarterly reports and bi-monthly financial statements for Rehoboth's Board of Directors. And with the drill-down functionality, users can dig in to find even more information if needed. This makes it easier for Rehoboth to assess the most impactful programs, where additional resources might be required, and ultimately provide a higher quality of care to those they serve.
"It's just invaluable to validate why we do what we do with our money and time. Our reports have just become more efficient. We are right down to the dollar with our spending. We are more fiscally responsible than ever because we can report accurately to the government."
Janice Gerbrandt
Director of Corporate Services, Rehoboth Christian Ministries
Janice also mentions that there's been a big payoff with Sparkrock 365 and significant organizational adoption from when they first got the system up and running. The permission-based roles give users access to what they need to do their job correctly. Management now has visibility into budgets, schedules, volunteer hours, and attendance management which was a big problem in their previous system. With over $1 million in vacation liability, ensuring employees use vacation appropriately was another top priority for their Board of Directors.
Submitting source deductions on time is no longer an issue, and Sparkrock has helped save thousands in fines for Rehoboth. Overall, it's been much easier for them to stay on top of payroll, manage their staff and provide care to those who need it most.
Right to Play (RTP) is committed to using the transformative power of play to educate and empower children around the world who are facing adversity. Founded in 2000 by four-time Olympic gold medalist and social entrepreneur Johann Olav Koss, Right to Play uses play, including sport-based games and activities, to teach children essential life skills such as how to protect themselves from disease, resolve conflict, and create peaceful communities.
Before implementing their new solution, a key donor might donate via multiple routes; both personally and via their company. One of those donations would then show up as a corporate donation, but in reality, the person who needed to be stewarded was the individual within the company.
Their old financial software couldn’t give them that breakdown of information because there was no true reporting on the individual. The solution manager would have to know to go into the spreadsheets and look for and add up the donor amount manually – and that was assuming the spreadsheets had up-to-the minute information.
Then there was the harmonization of donor data within spreadsheets from each of the fundraising offices around the world. Financial information used to be separated from actual donor information, whereas the new system now integrates the donor’s data with their donation information.
Right to Play’s engagement with Sparkrock has helped the organization create, pilot, and improve many of their technology tools, including specific enhancements to incorporate business processes such as the end-to-end management of grants and other types of restricted fundraising. The way the money is broken down from the donors’ perspective and RTP’s perspective is well captured.
For example, if a donor agrees to a multi-year grant, each year can include a different dollar amount for different projects. The donor could be looking at their year as June to June; Right to Play’s fiscal year is January to January.
Their new solution allows them to capture all of this information and look at it from the two diverse perspectives through custom reporting capabilities.
Managing donor funds and allocations to programs in over 20 countries on four continents, Right to Play’s Donor Management system is now able to support online integration of their grants management and funding allocation processes, allowing them to work more efficiently and give more of their focus to affecting sustainable change for children globally.
“We deal with many different government funders and Sparkrock’s financial solution gives us the flexibility to get the required information reported properly, accurately and fast. It’s wonderful and liberating to be confident that our information is correct.”
Katherine Thebeau
CRM Solution Manager
Additionally, a project can have a number of donors in one fiscal year, so they have to make sure they don’t over-allocate, leaving another project underfunded. Through reporting within the new solution, the Right to Play team can pull out the big picture – for all the donors and projects – as line by line items.
This allows them to better allocate funds to programs internationally, with up-to-date financial information that’s viewable at the touch of a button.
Lastly, by utilizing custom reporting capabilities within their solution, RTP now has the power to do much more complex analysis and calculations, and can get a better overall picture of where donations are being used and what their programs are accomplishing. This allows them to take this information back to their donors and show them the impact they’re having.
The Robin Hood Association is committed to excellence in assisting individuals with disabilities to achieve their personal best and experience a quality lifestyle. Individuals served by the Robin Hood Association will have the opportunity to experience a satisfying and fulfilling lifestyle based on personal choice, dignity and respect.
Before they implemented their Sparkrock solution, The Robin Hood Association was using 4 different systems across Administration and Finance. They had a very manual payroll process, and had around 700-800 timesheets that they had to manually code and key every two-week pay cycle. Their master schedule for 55 locations was managed by an excel spreadsheet and one person, their Master Scheduler, who’s brilliant at what he does but when he goes away on holidays it’s very difficult for anyone to fill in because the knowledge that he holds, up til now, was only in his head. This left a lot of room for error and put a lot of pressure on one or two people who were in charge of scheduling and payroll, creating a lack of shared accountability across the organization.
Now the Robin Hood Association has all four modules implemented and stable.
“The magic and the beauty of the system is how the modules link together for admin and financial purposes. That is why the solution is so cool, because it links everything together.”
Trevor Ducharme
Director of Administration
With their new integrated system, Human Resources manages people’s positions and the financial allocations that are linked to those positions, the scheduler and the scheduling module manages the planned live schedules of the individuals, payroll manages the actual hours that people work, and then finance is the end result of all that information trickling through the system.
Within the financial module they now can find all of their organization’s financial data, fed by the other modules. This allows then to easily assemble comprehensive financial reports to submit to their Board, and gives them deeper insight to make crucial organizational decisions.
“The best thing about the Sparkrock solution is the way it links Human Resources to Scheduling, to Payroll, and then ultimately to Finance. Now that we have all four modules implemented and stable, the magic and the beauty of it is how they speak to one another for admin and financial purposes.”
Trevor Ducharme
Director of Administration
They are growing very quickly at Robin Hood, there is a high demand for service, and the solution helps them accommodate that rapid growth. Now that everything is in one solution and all linked together, Robin Hood is now able to share all of their information – all the schedules for all the staff across all the locations – and make it transparent and available for everyone.
Staff can view their schedules, supervisors can view the timesheets, they can both verify that it’s correct, and then payroll just has to hit a button and the money goes to the bank. Now instead of having one person managing the schedule, there are 100 supervisors and 500 employees all doing their piece.
“It’s such a streamlined process nowadays versus the manual process that it once was and we have extra eyes looking at it instead of just the schedule person and the payroll person”
Trevor Ducharme
Director of Administration
As well, implementing an Employee Portal alongside their solutions has allowed them to link the entire organization with over 55 locations through a common tool (Locations, schedules, reporting structures, timelines, checks and balances, etc.), which has also helped grow the skill sets of their staffing base.
Robin Hood is also looking forward to connecting the last piece of their puzzle, which is Sparkrock’s Case Management module. They chose a system like Sparkrock because they want to ensure that they’re protecting the individuals that they serve by safeguarding their personal, confidential information.
“If you’re using a network drive or network files, there’s always risk of accidental deletion, copy-paste issues, or saving overtop of important information. With Case Management, we’ll be able to eliminate issues of deleting on accident or copying and replacing information, so it’s going to be a much more secure solution for keeping client data safe and protecting the information of the individuals that we support.”
Trevor Ducharme
Director of Administration
Ducharme also praises the Customer Success and Support team at Sparkrock, saying
“The support that we receive from the team at Sparkrock is very timely when we need it. Sometimes with payroll, when you’re under the gun or in a crunch situation, you need that support, you need it now, and you need it done right. Sparkrock has been there for us every time, and we’re very grateful for that support.”
Trevor Ducharme
Director of Administration
Polycultural Immigrant and Community Services makes a dramatic impact to over 10,000 individuals every year – including newcomers, youth, women, and seniors – by providing them with a range of programs to help them transition to their new homes in Canada. These services include newcomer orientation, education, language training, and employment and family support services. The individuals and communities served by Polycultural will have an equal opportunity to be productive members of Canadian society by being given the skills and support they need in order to succeed.
When Marwan Ismail first began his role as Executive Director at Polycultural 7 years ago, he knew that the organization had the potential to provide significant support to Canadian communities, but the organization first needed to make some significant and strategic internal changes in order to achieve their mission.
Polycultural began to put substantial effort into improving their internal processes, and updating their technology was a big part of this initiative. They knew that they would not be able to do their work effectively without the proper tools in place. Before implementing their Sparkrock Finance and Workforce Management solution, Polycultural was feeling the pain of a lack of integration, which led to an abundance of human errors and slow, manual processes that did not leave enough hours in the day to get everything done.
This lack of integration between their old systems didn’t allow them to see the full picture of what their organization was doing or how successful their programs were. Because their Finance and HR departments weren’t integrated, they had to spend extra time entering information into separate spreadsheets for each department. Their staff timesheets across 5 locations were all done manually, meaning that physical timesheets from over 100 employees had to be filled in, signed, and then mailed. The way things were just wasn’t sustainable for what Polycultural wanted to achieve.
Now that Polycultural has implemented Sparkrock’s Finance and Workforce Management solutions, they no longer need to worry about the time-consuming inefficiencies they once had. Their chart of accounts has been reduced from 42 pages to just 2, and the time it takes to do payroll has been reduced to a third of the time it used to take.
Employee relations between departments have also improved because now there is integration, removing the potential for miscommunication or human error due to double entry of information in two separate systems.
“Because our Sparkrock ERP solution provides us with real-time data and insights, we all have a clear perspective on how we’re doing and where we can make improvements – leading to better, more informed decisions.”
Marwan Ismail
Executive Director at Polycultural Immigrant and Community Services
Another change Polycultural underwent was the elimination of what they called “March Madness.” Before, they would have to monitor their slippage and budgets very carefully in order to maintain their government funding for the next year. At the end of each of their fiscal years in March they would realize they had not spent their budget to its full capacity and have to do a mad dash to spend the remaining funds effectively or risk having a reduction in funding the following year.
Now that’s no longer a problem because their solution gives them real-time insight into budget spent, committed and remaining, making it easy to ensure they’re managing all programs effectively.
Ultimately, the more time and resources staff can save, the more money they can put into their programs and the more people they can serve. By eliminating redundant and manual processes, Polycultural is now able to dedicate more time and resources to their mission and to their staff.
Currently they are one of the top three Settlement Organizations in the Greater Toronto Area, which was made possible in part by having the right tools to manage the back-end of their operations.
Another way they are leveraging technology is by measuring their metrics and KPIs more than ever before. By using their solution’s deep reporting capabilities, they’re able to more closely monitor what’s going on in their organization, understand how they’re impacting clients and employees, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Before implementing their new solution they were “guesstimating” details, but now they can accurately report and measure their activities and feel confident in what’s happening in the organization. The biggest improvement ED Marwan Ismail finds though, is the increased transparency the solution gives them.
“Our integrated Sparkrock solution helps us to be increasingly transparent. Because the solution provides us with real-time data and insights, we all have a clear perspective on how we’re doing, and where we can make improvements. Because we’re working with taxpayer’s money and the goodwill of people, we must ensure we’re transparent and accountable as stewards of public funding.”
Marwan Ismail
Executive Director
The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) is an independent, national, nonprofit organization. Their mission, to foster ethical sport for all Canadians, is carried out through research, promotion, education, detection and deterrence, as well as through programs and partnerships with other organizations.
As the demands on the organization grew, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports (CCES) struggled with providing transparency and accountability from their legacy DOS-based system. The software was too cumbersome to allow them to optimize fund management, provide budgetary control, or manage complex reporting requirements, and manual processes were slowing down their efficiencies. Because of this, they began to look for a system that was better-tailored towards their specific needs as a Nonprofit.
Sparkrocks Finance & Accounting solution is built specifically for non-profits, CCEES’ users found it easy to understand and navigate. Flexibility with reporting on project streams, ease of producing financial statements, and ability to quickly retrieve historical transactional information. Other advantages include:
After a very rapid implementation – about one month – the staff at CCES noticed immediate time savings, as the retrieval of pertinent financial information became much easier to access. Integration across departments saved CCES an initial $25,000 in accounting costs, and even in the early stages, time savings of half an FTE allowed staff to move from manual clerical work to automated, analytical processes. Data access outside of administration office walls also allowed for more efficient, real-time reporting.
“Since the Sparkrock solution is built specifically for nonprofits, our users find it easy to understand and navigate, and they enjoy having quick access to data at their fingertips. The main strengths of the system include the flexibility to report on project streams, ease of producing financial statements, and retrieving historical transactional information.”
Gary Laverdure
Manager of Financial Operations
Canadian Baptist Ministries is a global mission organization committed to sharing God’s love through word and deed. They believe that God brings healing to a broken world through local churches. With over 140 years of experience, they have seen that words and deeds intertwined in Christian community work together to bear witness to God’s transforming grace. Their primary mission is to partner with local churches around the world to bring hope, healing and reconciliation through word and deed, and are dedicated to developing sustainable ministries with their partners which enable them to increase their long-term capacity.
Previous to implementing their Sparkrock solution, Canadian Baptist Ministries struggled with providing transparency and accountability from their legacy DOS-based system, Accpac. The software was too cumbersome to allow them to optimize fund and grant management, provide budgetary control, or manage complex reporting requirements, and manual processes were slowing down their efficiencies.
This solution did not integrate well with their other management software, with specific issues arising between their financial and donor management systems. There was a lot of manual intervention needed to manage grant and funding related processes and it was taking them long periods of time to close the books. Not only was CBM’s old system non-integrated, but it was also partially paper-based and involved Excel spreadsheets and the need to import and export large amounts of data from disparate systems. Expenses were coming in from the field mainly in a manual format, and then they would have to manually tie the two together in their systems. Of course, because this process was paper-based and not automated it took a lot of extra time and manual effort to be able to match their expenses and revenues.
Their close dates took anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks beyond receiving the financial information into their organization, and they quickly grew to realize that a world class organization could not accept this delay as a standard any longer. With statutory pressures growing, they realized they needed to be able to understand their revenue streams and budgets in real-time if they wanted to have the maximum impact on their mission and the lives of the people they serve, and this triggered them to begin to look for a system that was better-tailored towards their specific needs as a nonprofit.
Now CBM has their Sparkrock Finance Management system implemented and stable.
“The Sparkrock solution works really well because it’s a fully integrated solution right from revenue back into the back end. As soon as you input a piece of information or know the piece of information is live, the data flows seamlessly across the system and you can see exactly where you stand in regards to financials and revenue. The ability to access this information quickly, trust the integrity of our data, and close our books in a timely manner – we’re now closing our books in 10 days as opposed to 4-6 weeks – is a really great change.”
Rob Jackett
Director of Administration
Even just the level of discussion needed to implement the solution brought CBM closer together. It’s forced the organization’s different departments to talk more and cooperate when internal processes and actions need to be coordinated, requiring a more involved team approach to the tasks of the organization. If one department makes a mistake, another department will catch it – increasing data integrity and reducing inaccuracies they used to struggle with.
One of the largest advantages of switching to Sparkrock’s Finance and Accounting solution is that CBM can now easily access up-to-the-minute financial information.
“One of the things we’re able to do now that we weren’t before is that we’re able to get to important data that we weren’t before, or if we could get to it then it was in streams of paper – the report would be 100 pages long. Now we’re able to data mine in a much more effective and efficient manner, so we’ve reduced our cost of administration and reduced our cost of analysis. We’re quicker and can make smarter and more timely decisions.”
Rob Jackett
Director of Administration
The project management module implemented by Sparkrock is also very important to CBM’s ministry. All of the history of the project revenue that’s coded within the system is there. There’s a project card which details all of the information regarding the project in terms of the project number, the description of the project, who the beneficiaries of the project are, who the leads are on the project (both from an internal and an external partner perspective), descriptions of what the activities are, along with any reporting that comes back.
All of this documentation is able to be easily attached within the module, so anyone who has access to the system – and they have people that access the system from different locations around the world – are able to go in and get the details of the project. This feature, to be able to have that information readily accessible and up-to-date, is critical to their successful program delivery at the management level, the project level, and the program level.
Ultimately, the better and easier the administrative team can do their work, the less time field workers have to spend doing admin or paper work, worrying about staff getting paid, or questioning the integrity of their data. This gives them more time and resources to spend on their programs and provides better services and support to the people they serve around the world.
Action Group is a nonprofit community agency supporting adults and children with developmental disabilities. Established nearly 40 years ago, Action Group provides services throughout Central Alberta from its main office in Lacombe. Their primary mission is to “make a difference in our communities by providing education and services that help people become leaders in their own lives.”
Before implementing their Sparkrock Manage solution (Finance Management and Workforce Management), Action Group struggled to manage the data and process silos that had popped up between the Finance and Human Resources departments.
Information was stored either manually or in different systems, causing staff endless hours of work piecing the information together for a successful payroll process. Compounding this challenge was the management of timesheets.
For starters, the process was manual, which meant Action Group was processing over 600 timesheets by hand every two-weeks. The complexity of the timesheets was huge, and there was no efficient way to cross-reference information to get a complete view of their employees, their time, or schedules.
Sometimes they’d have to spread all the timesheets cross a table to determine if people were going overtime, and then all of this data had to be manually coded and keyed into their finance and payroll system: Accpac. To add salt to the wound – because some of their timesheets were handwritten, they couldn’t be easily read and then had to be verbally clarified with staff.
Just like many other community-based nonprofits, Action Group’s timesheet and payroll were tied closely together. This posed a huge operational risk whenever they had churn in their administration because all the knowledge about their manual timesheet process would leave the building with the exiting employee.
To make matters worse, the transition to a new payroll administrator was challenging because it was very difficult to teach the disconnected processes to someone new. Even with a seasoned payroll administrator, there were still many payroll inaccuracies because payroll and finance were in Accpac while all other HR admin tasks were accomplished in other systems, or in Excel spreadsheets.
Action Group often found that the information between systems didn’t match up, creating hours of data validation. Other challenges that Action Group faced were in their staff scheduling processes and the replacement of shifts. Their frontline staff were frustrated with paper-based schedules that were posted on a bulletin board in their workplace, forcing them to physically come in to view their schedule. If they wanted to make changes to the schedule, they’d simply cross out and write new information in – opening them up to errors and conflicting information.
As well, if someone couldn’t make it for a shift it was extremely time-consuming to find a replacement. The supervisor would have to pick up the phone and call around to ask other staff if they would take the shift. This led them to often rely on internal staff who became overworked (and had to be paid overtime) or they’d have to reach out to their extended contact list whose information was typically out of date or were already working somewhere else.
Because of these time-consuming, frustrating, and potentially damaging issues with timesheets, payroll and scheduling, Action Group realized they were at risk to scale their operations because they weren’t using an effective system.
Now that Action Group has their Sparkrock Manage system implemented and stable, David Williams, the Communications and Technology Director who’s been with the organization for 15 years, says his staff love it and have become accustomed to having all of their information readily available to them online.
“We feel our Sparkrock solution is the hub of the wheel that spokes out to all of our supervisors and staff and provides them with all of the information they need to serve our clients better. If you’re working with a broken or ineffective hub, then it’s a wobbly ride for everyone touched by your organization. Sparkrock provides us with a solid hub that allows us to do better admin work, which ultimately allows us to do better with our clients.”
David Williams
Communications and Technology Director
Even just the level of discussion needed to implement the solution has brought Action Group closer together. It’s forced the organization’s different departments to talk more and cooperate when internal processes and actions need to be coordinated, requiring a more involved team approach to the tasks of the organization. If one department makes a mistake, another department will catch it – increasing data integrity and reducing inaccuracies they used to struggle with.
“Even from a very high-level look at the benefits, Sparkrock’s solution is significantly easier to work with and has helped us break down our silos. It’s a more straightforward solution and data and processes flow in a structured and standard way. Because the solution is integrated to our accounting (90% of our actual costs are workforce related) we are sharing data quicker and, as a result, people know a lot more about their roles and their impacts on other departments. It’s helped to standardize practices and reduced the risk of having that ‘breaking-point’ person who everyone relies on and, if they leave, everything falls apart.”
David Williams
Communications and Technology Director
Ultimately, the better and easier the administrative team can do their work, the less time supervisors have to spend doing admin or paper work, worrying about staff getting paid, worrying if timesheets are correct, or questioning the integrity of their data. This gives them more time to spend with clients and provides better services and support to the people they serve.
Sparkrock’s Online Employee Scheduling module alone has saved Action Group an estimated 1.5 full-time employees they used to need to process payroll. Before the switch, they seemed to be continually increasing staffing to deal with the workload of managing timesheets, schedules, payroll, etc. Now they’ve been able to reallocate these resources to other more-strategic duties – instead of having them occupy a data entry role, they can now use them for more highly-skilled data analysis and data monitoring.
The solution has also helped with staff retention and succession through the Employee Centre and the feature of Relief Bidding.
“Because 95% of our staff work in remote locations, they used to be so disconnected from the agency it was almost like they didn’t work for us at all. To have the Employee Centre where they’re connected to all the other staff, agency policies, all the information they need – it’s helped remove the isolation that staff felt in some of our more remote locations.”
David Williams
Communications and Technology Director
Before, supervisors had to spend time calling around to fill a shift; there was no easy way to connect those who couldn’t work with those who wanted to work. Now, they can post the open shift online and staff who are looking to pick up extra hours can view all of the open shifts and make requests to take them.
When staff are spread out amongst almost 50 locations and not getting a chance to work in different locations they might not feel like a part of the agency as a whole. In the past it was difficult to explore other opportunities in other locations if staff weren’t 100% happy with their current position. Now, because of Relief Bidding, staff can easily pick up a shift at another location to see if it’s a better fit for them, which ultimately makes it more likely that they’ll stay with the agency by finding better options instead of quitting.
“With our new system we’ve reduced the need for 1.5 full-time employees and have been able to reallocate these resources from data entry into more strategic duties.”
David Williams
Communication & Technology Director
This also gives them the opportunity to develop new skills by experiencing different roles in different locations with different clients, which creates more well-rounded staff in general. So not only has Relief Bidding made it significantly easier to fill shifts, but it has also helped to make staff feel more connected, become more skilled and well-rounded, and helped with retention – which in turn has helped Action Group deliver consistently high-quality services to their clients.
The Canadian Museum of History (CMH) operates the Canadian Museum of History, the Canadian War Museum and the Virtual Museum of New France. In addition to its mandate to protect and curate items of national cultural importance, the Museums function as centres for research and public information on the social, military and human history of Canada.
The Museum had long run on a legacy ERP system which made reporting a long and highly labour intensive process.
“We had been using an old ERP system but we’d struggled as a finance team to get information out of it. It was very old, not user friendly and very labour intensive. Reports came out in PDF format which then had to be manually transferred into Excel.”
Linda Hurdle
Chief Financial Officer, Canadian Museum of History
The system, by its nature also dictated many of the processes and procedures at the organization and it therefore had a broad impact museum-wide. Processes were manual and paper-heavy resulting in time consuming delays, inefficiencies and frustration, organization wide.
Having assessed their requirements and discussed possibilities with Sparkrock, a project was undertaken to replace the existing ERP system with Sparkrock 2016.
Augmenting the backend, Sparkrock Employee Center was installed, distributing role specific access to certain functionality, allowing non-core users the ability to view a report, approve an invoice, check budgetary status etc. All of this had to be completed in a very short timeframe (4 months) in time for April 30th year end.
“Generating the quarterly reports for the Board used to be incredibly stressful for the entire finance division. But that’s not the case anymore,”
Linda Hurdle
Chief Financial Officer, Canadian Museum of History
1. Reporting & Analysis
Now that the labour intensive element of the reporting function has been replaced, the stress of the quarterly reporting and reporting up to the Board has been removed. What used to take 3 full time people 2 days (2,880 minutes) to output from the old ERP can now be generated by a single click, in less than a minute, a 288,000% improvement.
2. Better Decision Making
With improved reporting and analysis on accurate up-to-date figures, the Board and senior management now have the data and the time they need to make more informed decisions to run the organization.
3. Total Procurement Visibility
The Board gained end-to-end visibility on from purchase order to payment, with requisition approval workflows and automated orders based on business rules.
4. Improved Staff Productivity
Staff are no longer burdened with manual processes such as re-keying of information or having to deal with mountains of paper invoices.
5. Integrated Solutions
Using solutions from Microsoft ensures that integration and inter-operability is built into the products at a base code level.
6. Much More Information
Much Better Access: With the solutions they now have in place, Finance staff at CMH can gain access to more information and drill down into records to see what is behind the topline numbers.
The Learning Enrichment Foundation (LEF) offers childcare services, employment and settlement services, skills advancement programs, language training, youth programs and entrepreneurship programs to individuals and families in northwest Toronto.
Their accounting software was unable to deliver on the complex reporting and information requirements of the foundation’s board and funders. Generating reports that documented the impact of funding across a wide variety of services required searching through paper files, huge amounts of manual effort and comparing spreadsheets side by side to track revenues and expenses across hundreds of contracts.
We helped LEF migrate to our enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, one that includes finance, workforce management, payroll and employee scheduling.
"I can now move someone up into accounts receivable much more quickly than we could before. The old, manual processes required months of specialized training and departmental knowledge transfer. Now, all of that is programmed into the system, and automated."
Bill Kennedy
VP of Finance
LEF now has the power to expand their programs without growing their headcount. Their accounting staff now perform higher-value tasks than simply maintaining cumbersome spreadsheets. Their new ERP solution supports better decision making, helping the organization report back to the board of directors and funders to demonstrate the positive impact funding is having on the individuals and families they serve.
Kenora District Services Board delivers needed social services to all citizens in the District of Kenora, Ontario. They provide assistance to Ontario Works, Social Housing, Emergency Medical Services and Early Learning and Child Care Services under the vision that with forward thinking and engaged employees they can achieve consistent service and better outcomes.
As Kenora District Services Board expanded they needed a more advanced financial management solution and several other product enhancing features to support their operations. They had three main pain points.
The first was reporting; with their existing financial software, reports were time consuming to create and the capability to easily update reports was not there.
The second was navigation; within their system it was hard to find what they were looking for. It often took several clicks or drill downs to find relevant information and the search capability of the system was not thorough.
Lastly, end users did not have access to the information they needed. The Finance team was constantly being asked for data and figures, which had to be manually pulled and distributed. Since this data was a snapshot, it became stale very quickly.
By implementing our integrated Finance solution, KDSB was able to achieve greater operational efficiencies, including easy access to real-time data, allowing for better decision making and increased employee productivity now that staff could access financial information without dependence on the Finance department. The new system not only provides access to this information, but also employs an intuitive user interface that makes finding specific data quick and easy.
“After investigating multiple solutions, we were impressed with the flexibility and knowledge of the Sparkrock team. Sparkrock’s Finance solution met all our critical component requirements while providing the opportunity for future growth. Their knowledge of our industry and willingness to find solutions to our unique reporting needs made them the best choice for now and the future.”
Corrine Owen
Director of Finance & Asset Management
After implementing their new solution, KDSB was able to immediately reduce their accounting costs quite drastically and realized significant improvements in efficiency.
The new solution virtually eliminated human errors of keying in information, and their reporting became a breeze! With a flexible system that could be updated to meet changing ministry standards, their month-end reports were able to be completed in a fraction of the time.
Overall, because of these new-found efficiencies, KDSB is now saving a considerable amount of money per year, which is being reallocated back into their services.