Greentree is the catalyst for growth for Centacare

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. Centacare also provides accounting support for six external organisations.

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

Very, very cost-effective

Greentree presented a cost-effective solution for the non-profit organisation and offered vast time savings with regards to data entry, financial reporting and inter-company processing. The Greentree Business Partner, based in Adelaide, implemented the core financial modules for the four users and managed effectively the migration of CBA data into Greentree.

Centacare has 20 branches that forward a monthly summary of their activity to its Accounting headquarters, which is updated directly into Greentree. Centacare produces over 70 financial reports each month and now only uses one template in Excel, allowing quick and streamlined reporting. Andrew Neville, Manager of Finance and Administration, says, “Greentree is delivering great time and cost savings and has simplified our financial reporting.” He continues, “We have achieved far more than we expected to. Greentree has freed up a lot of time; I can’t say enough positive things about it.”

Very, very flexible

Centacare has found data entry in Greentree to be very flexible with the import facility. Andrew 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 coordinate across the units. Greentree has alleviated this workload.”

Very, very quick

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. Centacare finds the bank statement entry and reconciliation function 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. Andrew continues, “The month-end process would normally take 28-29 days while waiting for all data to come in. With Greentree, and using new company procedures, we have halved the time to 14 days.”

Full multi-company capabilities are supported in Greentree, with each company able to operate in different accounting periods and different year-ends if required. Inter-company clearing accounts can be defined and are automatically posted to when entering inter-company transactions. This ensures each company’s ledger is always in balance. Andrew comments, “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.”

Very, very impressive

Centacare has also received external praise for its high-standard processes and Greentree. Andrew explains, “Our auditors were impressed with the ease in which our accounts were produced and also with the functionality in Greentree, which allowed information to be extracted easily and in a way that other competitive products could not.”

Andrew Neville feels that Greentree has enabled the organisation to review its business practices further. He says, “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.” He concludes, “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.”