For many years, Scouts Australia’s Finance Team had been using Xero, but were finding themselves held back by the accounting software’s inability to effectively adapt to the organisation’s structure.

The team faced issues around reporting and consolidation and were finding themselves spending too long working in Excel spreadsheets.

Annette Dynska, Finance Manager for Scouts Australia, says “I was spending days preparing different monthly reports in Excel, and knew it was time to change”.

“We’d grown internally” adds Neil Carey, Scouts Australia’s General Manager, “there were certain things that we couldn’t do in our existing accounting system, and it was taking a long time for even basic tasks to be completed.

“Added to that, we run several trips overseas – called international contingents – for Scout groups, all with their own budgets and financials. We didn’t always have an accurate picture of where the contingents were financially on their budgets, so we knew that we needed to improve the situation”.

Scouts Australia began looking for a new system that would make consolidated reporting easy and that could simplify and streamline the account reconciliation process – minimising manual data manipulation in Excel.

“After reviewing several solutions, we chose Wiise (built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central) for several reasons, including the fact that we use Microsoft 365 both nationally and across our branches, and there’s familiarity” says Neil.

The Scouts Australia team considered a number of implementation partners, eventually engaging Clade (a Brennan company) to take the Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) implementation forward.

“The partner decision wasn’t about money” says Neil, “it was about the relationship, and getting good answers to our questions. And we had confidence in knowing Clade had a history of working with clients in the not-for-profit space”.

The system implementation process wasn’t without its ups and downs. “Our biggest challenge was that we needed implementation to be complete by our financial year end, to start the new fiscal year in Wiise” says Annette.

“It meant that closing the financial year collided with us implementing the new system. As a small team of two, we were juggling our day-to-day workload, while also developing the system and getting it implemented, to go live by the end of March”.

Neil adds, “We definitely faced challenges during the implementation process but had total support from Clade, with consultants on-hand to give advice”.

After meeting the new financial year deadline and going live with Wiise in March, Scouts Australia’s Finance Team quickly saw improvements in their ways of working.

“I can already do much more in Dynamics 365 than I was able to do in Xero” says Annette. “Now I can see all our business units under one umbrella, and I can consolidate all accounts and budgets based on business unit. I get corresponding reports too, meaning no more data manipulation in Excel. I couldn’t do that in Xero, as every business unit had its own General Ledger, which made reporting difficult”.

Looking to the future…

The team at Scouts Australia plans to use Wiise and Business Central to further increase financial visibility across the organisation.

“In the future we want to grant every budget holder access to the system, so they can go into their budget and see how they’re doing in terms of actual vs. budget” says Annette.

“The different kind of tasks that we now can now complete within the system or hope to be able to in the future – that’s amazing”.