The Medical Council of New Zealand achieving growth

The management felt the existing financial system, Greentree´s legacy product CBA, was increasingly unable to meet the functional requirements. They carried out a thorough review of its business system and a comparison of competitive products, including Greentree, against a set of criteria. The Council’s main aims were to upgrade to a more modern system using Windows functionality, and to have a system that provided more reporting flexibility and better data management.

Financial Controller, John De Wever, explains the importance of new technologies influencing their decision to change to Greentree. “We needed to update our system from DOS to Windows for ease of use and advanced capabilities. We chose Greentree, which uses a JADE database, as it provides a sound technology with new levels of data integrity and flexibility. Also, we already use a JADE system in-house and we wanted technology that is compatible.”

A key driver for moving to Greentree was the need for more financial and business management tools with flexible reporting structures. The finance team produces monthly accounts and management information for the Council’s regular meetings, as well as for the periodical meetings of the Audit Committee. John says, “CBA was unwieldy in terms of meeting our reporting requirements. The report writer in Greentree is very flexible and we have really found this to be a great benefit.”

Providing timely and informative reports helps ensure the organisation is operating effectively. All standard reports within Greentree have been designed to provide key information in a logical and easy-to-read format that can be tailored to suit the organisation's particular requirements. “We can now deliver a far superior product to Council, which they find really constructive. We can quickly present clear and accurate information in a tailored layout to show the many and varied views of our organisation.”

The finance team extensively uses analysis trees, which allow it to classify or group information in ways that are logical. These trees are used at report time for sorting and sub-totalling at any level. This powerful feature means the team can easily tailor many standard Greentree reports to provide key information in exactly the format it requires, particularly for management reporting. “Using Greentree ‘trees’ is an excellent way to organise our information. We are more productive and efficient with the tools we have available. It’s more complex than CBA but allows us to do so much more,” says John.

With over 10,000 registered doctors in New Zealand on the medical register, the Council needed a system to record key financial information on doctors’ competence reviews and investigation of complaints. The Greentree Job Cost module has been designed to provide an efficient and effective system for managing such jobs, and the Council is monitoring over 400 of these in the Job Cost system. By using the strong integration with the core financial system, they are able to track the costs and present the information in pivot tables in Excel. Greentree’s inquiry facility allows the team to view an entire project, with all costs summarised on screen, and can easily “drill down” through the defined job structures. “Using Job Cost has made the monitoring and reporting of the financial management side of competence reviews and complaint investigation much easier. We can use trees in the General Ledger to sort expenses, and we are able to see all levels of financial information for each cost centre, which is invaluable.” John concludes, “Greentree has made us better and smarter at what we do. We now have a multifaceted system, with the flexible structures we need to manage our information, on a modern platform.”