The York Region District School Board is committed to meeting the increasing demand for school space and accommodating the region's growth. Their unwavering focus on success and achievement keeps York Region students performing consistently above the provincial average. The board aims to empower students to realize their full potential and maintain exceptional academic achievements amidst the evolving educational landscape.
YRDSB faced significant challenges with their existing system, as many of their processes were excessively time-consuming and required significant manual labour. From a purchasing perspective, the board lacked sufficient reporting capabilities, leading to a lack of visibility into the procurement process.
The York Region District School Board successfully implemented the Sparkrock K-12 Finance Solution, resulting in significant improvements in the operational efficiency of their finance team. By leveraging this solution, the YRDSB team operates more strategically, with accelerated data access and robust reporting tools. Previously, all bank reconciliations were conducted externally from their system; however, with the seamless integration of the General Ledger, the reconciliation process can now be efficiently performed within the solution. This integration has streamlined their financial operations, enabling them to enhance their financial management processes and achieve greater effectiveness in handling their financial responsibilities.
"We’ve seen Sparkrock grow as a company over the years, and their response times are amazing. They listen to what we need and what we’re looking for, and it’s clear they are dedicated to being involved with their customers from their regular on-site visits.”
Dan Reynolds
Senior Manager of Finance
Following the implementation of Sparkrock, the YRDSB finance team has significantly enhanced their ability to assist a broader range of individuals. Adopting a new ERP system has empowered them to operate more proactively, granting them faster access to critical data and enabling them to harness the power of robust reporting tools. The heightened visibility of real-time data has proven valuable in facilitating streamlined and efficient purchasing processes, ultimately benefiting many organizational stakeholders.
"These areas where time and effort is saved benefit all members of the school board, although getting all school users on board for a new system can be tough. It is a big change, but ultimately once users learn the new system they truly enjoy it.”
Dan Reynolds
Senior Manager of Finance
By embracing a more modern solution, the YRDSB finance team continues to leverage technology effectively, expanding their capacity to provide timely and effective support to an increasing number of individuals. A few strategies employed by the board to entice users and engage them with the solution's potential revolved around its robust functionality, particularly with reporting. Users now receive monthly reports containing relevant and personalized data, allowing them to see the solution's potential in improving their work. Demonstrating how the solution can benefit them alleviates any uncertainties about learning something new. This proactive approach fostered excitement and confidence amongst users as they recognized the solution's capacity to enhance their everyday workflows.
Waterloo Catholic District School Board began as a one-room schoolhouse in 1836 and has become the 8th largest Catholic school system in Ontario. Their mission is that as disciples of Christ, they will educate and nurture hope in all learners to realize their full potential to transform God’s world.
Waterloo Catholic DSB began their journey with Sparkrock over 10 years ago. They faced increasingly complex financial reporting requirements, and the school board struggled with its aging ERP software, which its staff found difficult to use.
As a public sector organization, Waterloo Catholic DSB prioritizes transparency and accountability. As a result, the organization’s demand for financial reports was and is high. Its reporting needs were also becoming more complex due to changing accounting standards and new legislation promoting accountability. Technology tools had played an essential role in helping the school board meet these needs, but the aging BAS technology it was leveraging began creating challenges for the board as it grew.
“We were using technology implemented in 1983. It was functional, but we continually had users complaining about how difficult it was to use. Our users also had difficulty reading the data that was generated by the system. As our reporting needs grew, we found ourselves up against the wall in terms of what our old system could provide. Clearly something had to give.”
Shesh Maharaj
CFO/Superintendent of Corporate Services and Treasurer
The school board was also concerned about security issues around its existing solution. The product had been slated for an upgrade for six years. As the upgrade was yet to materialize, they felt the DOS-based solution was not providing the level of security Waterloo Catholic required for its confidential information. Considering these needs, the organization sought a business application solution that would be easy to use, cost-effective, and meet its complex reporting requirements efficiently and securely.
In 2004 Waterloo Catholic began working with Sparkrock (then Altus Dynamics) on implementing a business application solution.
Nicola Dickinson, one of Sparkrock’s founding partners, commented, "As with many education organizations, Waterloo Catholic had strict budgetary parameters for its new solution. This only reinforced the fit of the Microsoft Dynamics technology to their needs, as the solution is very economical.”
The Sparkrock implementation team worked alongside the Waterloo Catholic project team to ensure the solution precisely fits the school board’s needs. The seamless integration between Sparkrock and Waterloo Catholic’s other IT systems also helped ensure that financial information was easy to access at any time. Drill-down functionality and on-the-fly filters in the Sparkrock solution helped Waterloo Catholic transform budget tracking documents from passive summaries to practical instruments that offer precise statements with fully updated information.
The school board now has complete financial insight across the organization to make timely and informed decisions—with data from the current fiscal year and previous years. But the feature of the solution that made it stand out furthest above competitive products was that it works like other familiar Microsoft products, helping reduce the time required to learn how to use the software and fuel Waterloo Catholic’s productivity.
Waterloo Catholic immediately felt the benefit of their new solution in 2004.
“With the help of Sparkrock we have revamped our budgeting process. Tasks that used to take days to complete now take only hours. The difference is truly amazing. We got our weekends back!”
Shesh Maharaj
Executive Superintendent of Corporate Services & Treasurer
Budget management was simplified for Waterloo Catholic with the help of Sparkrock’s Finance solution and the cash management features. The solution automates bank account management tasks and the entire check-writing process. The school board has more visibility into its budgetary processes with bank reconciliation tools and bank account statistics reports.
With the ability to automatically import cleared cheques into the business management system, tracking budget spending has become easier for the organization, while data entry requirements have significantly decreased.
Waterloo Catholic can now email purchase orders, which allowed them to eliminate the need for a dedicated fax line, a modem, and software used to manage the faxing process under their old system. Simplifying the process has helped the school board realize cost and time savings as administrative staff can now focus on more strategic tasks.
The ease of use of the new solution allowed the school board’s staff to generate more reports in a significantly streamlined and quicker way and helped them make sense of the results. Where previously, staff members looking for specific types of information would have needed the assistance of an experienced report writer to generate a more complex report, today, they are comfortable performing such tasks independently.
“The user-friendly interface is the biggest immediate benefit we’ve seen. With our new system, transactional data is easy to read, budgets are easier to monitor, and users’ understanding of financial data is increasing across the organization. Our staff are now comfortable generating reports on their own to find the data they need—it’s a huge step for us.”
Shesh Maharaj
CFO/Superintendent of Corporate Services and Treasurer
Waterloo Catholic DSB has not looked back since their original purchase from Sparkrock in 2004. Over 10 years later, Waterloo Catholic still believes Microsoft Dynamics, provided by Sparkrock, is still the right choice for a sound financial and accounting management system for their board and the 55 schools they service.
The Huron-Perth Catholic District School Board has nurtured the development of students and families since 1847 and is fervently committed to high standards for achievement in teaching and learning. They are very proud of the quality of instruction within all schools and their commitment to inclusive learning spaces that provide differentiated opportunities for growth and development.
Before implementing the upgraded finance and HR/payroll solution, Huron-Perth faced several challenges that hindered their efficiency and data integrity. One major limitation was the absence of dimension validation during the posting process in their outdated system. Consequently, they had to perform numerous reallocation journal entries when it came time to generate reports for their schedules. This tedious and time-consuming task involved going back into their records to identify and correct misplaced postings. Such manual efforts drained valuable time and energy that could have been dedicated to other critical tasks.
The lack of validation functionality also resulted in uncertainty regarding the accuracy of their records. Without the ability to validate accounts before loading, there was a constant concern about data integrity and the reliability of the information pulled into their Ministry reports. This limitation significantly impacted their confidence in the reported data and the subsequent decision-making process.
“We evaluated the leading competitors in the K-12 school board business application market, but what impressed us most about the Sparkrock product was its flexibility. With Sparkrock we have the flexibility we need to respond to changing Ministry of Education reporting requirements. In addition, we feel confident that with the dedication of Sparkrock to the education market we’re purchasing a product that will continue to be well supported in years to come.”
Kevin Kale
Manager of Business Services at HPCDSB
Huron-Perth Catholic DSB first became a Sparkrock client in 2007, implementing the Finance & HR/Payroll solutions. Sparkrock supported Huron-Perth through the transition by constantly reassuring them with meetings and phone calls that they were on track with their implementation. Because the school board was nine versions behind, they were very nervous about the transition, particularly about their data accurately transferring.
“Sparkrock guided us and left no questions unanswered. They were there all the time, and they really held our hands."
Lisa Regier
Accounts Payable at HPCDSB
Sparkrock also sent Application Consultants on-site to help their team navigate the new software and the particular intricacies it holds for school boards. During the upgrade, the Sparkrock Customer Success team made numerous recommendations.
Mary-Ellen Ducharme, Manager of Finance, notes that “if your client success team recommends something, they know the product inside and out, listen to them because we found that 6 months down the road we wished we had acted upon the recommendations at the start.”
In the end, HPCDSB made the recommended changes and has experienced a smooth-running solution. Recently, Huron-Perth Catholic DSB underwent a substantial upgrade to bring their solution to the current version available.
With their upgraded finance and HR/payroll solution, Huron-Perth can now do dimension validation when posting, which has been an incredible time-saver. Using dimension combination validation allows them to check accounts before loading. If one is missing, they can quickly upload it and maintain their data integrity when they have to do reporting for Schedule 10.
“The solution is great because any time that can be saved between me and my team means that we have more time to provide support out in the schools to our portal users, to our department heads, and to our office assistants.”
Mary-Ellen Ducharme
Manager of Finance
Because their previous version was so old, they didn’t have the option to do validation before posting, so when it came time to do reporting for their schedules, they would have to do numerous reallocating journal entries. It took a lot of time and energy to go back into their records and determine where things should have been posted correctly in the first place. Now using dimension combination validation right in their GL before posting, they can rest assured that they have accurate records the first time around and trust the integrity of the data being pulled into their Ministry reports.
Mary-Ellen Ducharme notes, “The solution is great because any time that can be saved between me and my team means that we have more time to provide support out in the schools to our portal users, department heads, and office assistants.”
Mary-Ellen Ducharme“We believe it’s important to stay current because change is constant; we want to be up to date. We are a school board, so our teachers and students are always on the cutting edge of technology, so we certainly want to be on the same level as them. We want to have the best out there, and to us, that’s Sparkrock.”
Manager of Finance at HPCDSB
Bruce-Grey Catholic District School Board is committed to delivering a vibrant Catholic education. They ensure quality learning experiences through community partnerships that nurture each student in body, mind and spirit and embrace the teachings of Christ, giving witness to Gospel values.
Although Bruce-Grey first partnered with Sparkrock in 2009, reaping efficiency benefits in their finance system, such as the ability for more flexible and accurate reporting capabilities, which are crucial for school boards to maintain their funding, their Payroll solution was previously outsourced to a third-party vendor. This caused bottlenecks and significant strain on the department, which had to process payroll for over 500 permanent and 300 casual employees.
Before integrating, they would be manually posting a journal entry of 300-400 lines, and have to calculate it and input it manually every pay period.
"We weren’t able to be flexible enough to handle the complexity of some of the deductions and earnings that had to be calculated.”
Joyce Benninger
Supervisor of Payroll
When the school board realized they were wasting a significant amount of time inputting and calculating payroll manually, they didn’t have to look far to find a solution.
In 2014 they brought Sparkrock back to implement their HR/Payroll suite, including employee management and advanced scheduling tools. Alecia Lantz, Superintendent of Business and Treasurer, was particularly enthusiastic about the full integration of the HR/Payroll suite with their finance system and having all the modules under one roof and speaking to one another.
“It’s a more streamlined process of getting all our data into the General Ledger, and we can better analyze our accounts by being able to drill down to the minute detail of each transaction, including by location. And we’re really excited that account allocations are so much more accurate. If an individual is working in two different jobs, we can now split that out in our GL.”
Alecia Lantz
Superintendent of Business and Treasurer
Bruce-Grey also wanted to improve automation to give the schools self-access to end-to-end processes for requisitions, purchase orders and invoicing and to provide their users with real-time data to use to make better business decisions.
This was achieved by implementing and integrating the Sparkrock Employee Self-Serve portal, which gives users real-time access to the data and information they need via an online portal.
The administrative burden of filing was huge for Bruce-Grey CDSB before the new system, so an ‘electronic filing cabinet’ was incorporated into the 2014 project by integrating the document tagging and management tool, Kwiktag, with the Sparkrock HR/Payroll, procurement and finance processes.
“It’s rare to have such a strong solution provider that genuinely cares about its customers. It’s a long term partnership that we both very much benefit from.”
Alecia Lantz
Superintendent of Business and Treasurer
The tool allows users to tag documents with unique, retrievable codes; for example, as opposed to having to collate documents by the vendor – of which there may only be one in a batch of invoices received – employees can now tag documents with the codes and index them against attributes like ‘vendor.’ Accounts Payable staff can then streamline all data into a single file and then file by batch.
“Instead of digging manually through files we can now just pull invoices and other documents up on a computer screen – it’s been a huge time saver.”
Alecia Lantz
Superintendent of Business and Treasurer
The technology also means “we can set our auditors up with a computer, and they’re able to search documents on their own… that has saved us time and money.”
HR/Payroll employees have also been freed from all the time they used to spend searching for information and manually filing so that staff can do higher-priority work such as analysis. “There’s a great deal of analysis that can be conducted with the new technology solutions,” says Lantz. “We now can break down our analysis by ‘location’ and ‘group’ and drill down to the minute detail of each transaction.”
The new Employee Self-Serve Portal has also improved the school board’s efficiencies. Designated users, such as principals, at each of the 13 schools now have increased budgetary control and smoother procurement processes since rolling out the Employee portal.
About 100 staff use the tool to access their pay stubs and T4s, change their profile information, submit vacation time and more – all online in a secure browser. While the self-serve portal empowers all staff, the 300 casual employees, in particular, love how they can enter and check their hours online.
“They aren’t thinking we’re hiding how many sick or vacation days they have,” says Benninger. “They’ll be able to see at a glance all their statistics. If they have a name or address change, they’ll be able to make that change themselves and control it.”
"Other benefits of the new technology have been an incredible reduction of paper we process and tasks happening more quickly. Overall, we wish we implemented sooner!”
Alecia Lantz
Superintendent of Business and Treasure
Central Okanagan Public School District is located in Kelowna, BC, Canada. It serves a population of 25,000+ students across 47 schools. The district is in a state of growth and welcoming an increasing number of immigrant families and English Language Learners. Central Okanagan Public School’s vision statement is “Together We Learn."
Jon Rever is Assistant Superintendent of Schools at School District 23 (Central Okanagan) and also serves on several technology-related committees for the province.
Jon Rever
Assistant Superintendent of Schools
Central Okanagan Public School District
Central Okanagan used a legacy ERP system that had served their district for over thirty years. Challenges included paper-based, labour-intensive processes that were siloed into separate departments. Many processes were done in detached areas: in the system, on paper, via email, and had to move back and forth between departments. “People did the jobs they had to do [but] didn’t understand the full business processes they were engaged in,” Rever shared.
He added, “We were seeing the level of risk to the organization. Cybersecurity challenges were becoming more frequent and complex. We were worried about the infrastructure. We got to a place where the tolerance of risk to the organization had exceeded a threshold, knowing if something were to break, fail, or be attacked…we wouldn’t have been doing our due diligence to manage and mitigate that risk.”
In addition to these challenges, the district was also grappling with the increased complexity of both educational and business operations.
“How do we respond to the complexity we see in our classrooms, our schools, and spread across the district? As complexity increases and growth continues, we are bumping against significant budget pressures.”
Jon Rever
Assistant Superintendent of Schools
They began discussing a new solution when Central Okanagan was advised that their ERP software would no longer be supported. The new solution would need to improve:
“There’s an underlying effort to leverage the technology to achieve efficiencies, to digitize workflows, and recapture some of those labour-intensive dollars. We don’t have a challenge; we have multiple challenges. My role is to find ways to leverage the environment to make things more efficient and deliver better service,” stated Rever.
The decision to adopt Sparkrock 365 was made based on several key considerations. These included improving workflows, enhancing processes, and fortifying the cybersecurity of the organization.
Sparkrock 365 is powered by the world’s most trusted education ERP platform – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. “[This] was a huge decision point for us,” Rever said. “The fact that we could integrate our ERP into our Microsoft ecosystem and see efficiencies from that move by itself was significant. People are used to it, so they aren’t identifying it as a unique change because they’ve been working in this environment already.”
Another key factor was affordability. “We had multi-million dollar submissions, and we couldn’t touch them,” maintained Rever. “Some of these ERPs are just not affordable for school districts because of how we are funded.” Sparkrock 365 emerged as the affordable ERP solution that also served as a strategic response to the challenges Central Okanagan faced.
“The investment over time is really important to us because ERPs are not short-term endeavours. They are long-term relationships. We’ll be using Sparkrock well beyond my time in this organization.”
Jon Rever
Assistant Superintendent of Schools
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The implementation of Sparkrock 365 yielded transformative outcomes:
Regarding security, Rever explained, “One of the things that Sparkrock allows us to do is distribute workload across the organization, so we are asking people to engage in processes that they’ve never done before....the digitization of paper-based workflows actually increases our level of security. We can foresee and envision these processes, whether they are happening right now or whether they could happen in the future.” The reinforced security measures implemented by Sparkrock 365 lay the groundwork for a seamless transition into improved workflow efficiencies.
After implementing Sparkrock 365, Central Okanagan Public School District experienced significant shifts. The school ERP addressed immediate challenges like security and efficiency. It fostered more collaboration and accountability between departments. “Sparkrock forced us to come together and understand all our business processes. In Sparkrock, everyone understands that they share the data and are responsible for it. If you don’t do your bit properly, you will affect downstream processes. It helped us get solid on our change management, framework, and strategy,” elaborated Rever. “We went live in Finance last May, and I’m starting to hear people say things like, ‘It’s more efficient, it’s more user-friendly. We like it.’ They are adapting to the change, and they are getting used to it.”
To further illustrate the improved workflows, Rever shared an anecdote about their current purchasing card process, which used to be incredibly labour-intensive, with paper going all over the place. “By implementing Sparkrock 365,” he said, “What happens now is the transactions from over 450 purchasing cards come in and get uploaded and assigned to the users in the system. The users are notified and go into mySparkrock. They upload their receipts, attach them to the accounts, and then hit submit. That goes to accounts payable, where it’s verified and processed. It’s the same for expense claims and purchase orders. There’s no paper anymore. People are still notified, and there are still approvals, but it’s all digital.”
Sparkrock also positioned the district for ongoing success by leveraging technology to expand reporting and analytics capability. In discussing future goals for their school district, Rever remarked, “The real investment is around PowerBI and using it to generate customized reports for people they can interact with in different ways and filter data easily to distribute those reports out. That’s the future. In our 47 schools, we will build PowerBI dashboards for our Principals. They will be able to see their financial information, accounts, staff, attendance, absenteeism, all in one dashboard so they can easily access important information in one spot.”
As they continue to embrace Sparkrock 365, the commitment to long-term success is evident:
Rever stated, “I’m very much looking forward to the next several months. We’re very close to having our payroll system encompass all our employees, and that’s another process that will save massive amounts of labour.”
Sparkrock 365 provides incomparable customer service to its clients. In addition to training and implementation support, Sparkrock provides a Customer Success Center where users can:
“We have very positive relationships with the Sparkrock team, project managers, and consultants, and that’s how we need to work. Whenever we get into a complex project, the vendor isn’t just the vendor. The vendor is part of the team, and we need to function as a team."
Jon Rever
Assistant Superintendent of Schools
Rever believes the Sparkrock team has worked hard to build the capacity of their consultants and support services. “They’re listening to their customers. They’re invested in the future. I think there are so many good things to come,” he concluded.