Greentree means Centacare can be more caring

Adelaide’s Catholic Family Services organization, Centacare, has become more efficient with the aid of Greentree’s accounting suite…

Centacare Catholic Family Services is an agency of the Archdiocese of Adelaide, with a responsibility for providing a wide range of services to individuals, couples and families. It has 220 staff and also provides accounting support for six external organisations.

Centacare carried out a thorough system review and detailed requirements analysis, which showed it had a limited chart of accounts with CBA, needed to save more time at month-end, and to move away from a DOS to a Windows-based system. A number of products were evaluated including Greentree, ACCPAC and Great Plains.

Very cost-effective
Greentree presented a cost-effective solution for the non-profit organization, which offered vast time-savings with regards to data entry, financial reporting and inter-agency processing.

Greentree’s Adelaide business partner implemented the core financial modules and effectively managed the migration of the CBA data to Greentree.

Centacare has 20 branches that forward a monthly summary of their activities to their accounting headquarters, which is updated directly into Greentree. Centacare produces over 70 financial reports each month and now uses only one template in Excel, allowing for quick, streamlined reporting.

Andrew Neville, finance and administration manager, says, “Greentree is delivering great time and cost savings, and has simplified our financial reporting.

“We’ve achieved far more than we expected. Greentree has freed up a lot of time. I can’t say enough positive things about it.”

Very flexible
Centacare has found data entry in Greentree to be very flexible, using the import facility. Neville says, “Using the old system, we had to manually reconcile the bank information from each of the 20 branches, which was time-consuming and difficult to co-ordinate across the units. Greentree has alleviated this workload.”

Now each branch enters the information into a tailored Excel spreadsheet, which is emailed to the Adelaide head office. The data is then reconciled and imported automatically into Greentree.

The bank statement entry and reconciliation function is easy to use, with items simply confirmed with a mouse-click or keystroke.

Alternatively, bank transactions can be updated in bulk, via a file from the bank, and automatically reconciled.

“The month-end process would normally take 28-29 days, while waiting for all data to come in. With Greentree, and using new agency procedures, we’ve halved the time to 14 days.”

Full multi-agency capabilities are supported in Greentree, with each agency being able to operate using different accounting periods, and different year-ends if required. Inter-agency clearing accounts can be defined and are automatically posted to when entering inter-agency transactions.

This process ensures each agency’s ledger is always in balance. “The new functionality we have in Greentree has opened our eyes to how we do things. We have seen significant productivity gains using Greentree and, in fact, saved one day a week for one team member in this area,” says Neville.

Auditors ‘impressed’
Centacare has received external praise for the high standard of its processes using Greentree, says Neville.

“Our auditors were impressed with the ease with which our accounts were produced, and also with the functionality in Greentree, which allows information to be extracted easily and in a way that other competitive products can’t.”

Neville feels Greentree has enabled the organisation to review its business practices further. “The implementation of Greentree has also been the impetus for a major restructuring of our chart of accounts – and to see how we can get the most out of Greentree.”

“Greentree has been the catalyst to look at best practice. And its breadth of functionality has allowed new processes to be adopted and our organisation to grow,” he concludes.





> Greentree International
Graham Hill
P: 1800 000 737
E: graham.hill@greentree.com
W: www.greentree.com






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