Founded in 1938, Rocky Bay provides Clinical, Employment, Work Alternatives and Accommodation Services for over 1,000 children and adults with disabilities. As a large and long-established non-profit organisation, Rocky Bay has a responsibility to provide its stakeholders, the State and Federal governments and numerous fundraising groups, with accurate and timely information.

Rocky Bay identified a number of reasons for the move from a 10 year old Dos-based system, with limited analysis and reporting functionality requiring days of manual reindexing, to a Windows-based system that more progressively supported the 350-staffed organisation.

From time-poor to social time

Rocky Bay has seen noticeable improvements in terms of reduced time pressures and improved administration particularly with regards to data entry, management reporting and transaction analysis since the move to the fully integrated Greentree software.

Mervyn Williams, Rocky Bay Finance Director explains, “many of our administrative processes had to be carried out manually which was time-consuming, inefficient and error-prone at best.” In fact, 85 journal entries were regularly entered manually each month. Now these journals are simply collated in Excel and then imported directly into Greentree, leaving us free to carry out more progressive tasks. It’s made a real difference. Greentree has made us more productive and efficient with our time and resources and considerably exceeded our expectations.”

Simple, comprehensible reporting and well-informed stakeholders

Funded and accountable to the State and Federal governments and fundraising groups, it is important for Rocky Bay to provide open and verifiable information about their activities to these external stakeholders. “Information was scattered and couldn’t be viewed or exported easily and quickly, so it was restricting how we displayed our information” says Mr Williams.

Mr Williams also says that Greetree’s reporting flexibility enables them to extract data whenever they need it, tailor it for specific audiences and present it in a timely fashion to Board or other stakeholders for scrutiny. The good thing is that everyone understands what’s being presented to them.

The road less travelled – easy implementation

“We have an excellent working relationship with the local Greentree implementation Partner who showed us an easy route to the Greentree solution. There was no need to reinvent the wheel, as the Greentree product offered us cost-effectiveness, enhanced functionality and all the support we required,” in fact, Mr Williams made a particular point of highlighting the outstanding service and support Rocky Bay continues to receive from the local Greentree business partner.

“As a non-profit organisation, the functionality in Greentree has been an absolute boon for us. We have been able to save time and money by better managing our cost centres and grant maintenance in Greentree. These flexible reporting structures ensure that almost any financial reporting requirement can be easily fulfilled.”

Rocky Bay staff embrace tree analysis

Greentree allows an unlimited number of multi-levelled ‘Transaction Trees’ to be defined within the General Ledger which enables focused analysis of related or similar groups of data in Excel. For example, Rocky Bay has 79 cost centres to manage and as Mr Williams explains, “being able to use transaction trees for analysis of the costs associated with our 70 vehicles and vans, grants, fund raising activities and insurances has certainly improved the way we work. We use this area significantly and have 23 different transaction trees. Greentree has really aided the reconciliation of grants, which took 3-4 days to reconcile key balance sheet items, now it only takes 3-4 hours” he adds.

Transaction Tree Analysis enables massive time-savings in FBT calculations

An invaluable example of the power and usability of transaction tree analysis is the calculation of Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) related to the private and business use of vehicles. This is particularly important for not-for-profit organisations such as Rocky Bay where a large portion of their employee’s remuneration is related to salary sacrifice benefits. Being able to quickly produce Vehicle Usage/FBT statements is one of the functions the local Greentree business partner built into the customised database interface, Rock Data Manager. Before Rock Data Manager, Rocky Bay had to manually enter data into a spreadsheet for each Vehicle/Employee combination. In terms of actual value to the business, “this has reduced the time involved from 2 weeks per year to 2-3 hours per quarter which is a huge productivity gain for us” says Mr Williams.

Rocky Bay has a responsibility to manage its financial resources in an open and transparent manner. Greentree, and in particular its integration with Excel, has enabled significant improvements in Rocky Bay’s governance of its financial and operational performance and the reporting of that performance to its stakeholders. Rocky Bay has effectively met its statutory obligations and Mr Williams is confident the business will continue to benefit from the sophisticated analysis and reporting Greentree offers for many years to come.

About Rocky Bay

Crippled Children, was founded in 1938. The organisation provides care and support for people with disabilities, particularly those with neuromuscular and other neurological disorders. Their client group includes people with muscular dystrophy, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and those with an acquired brain injury.

Rocky Bay currently supports in excess of 1,000 children and adults with disabilities. The services supported in this area are: Employment, Clinical, Respite and Accommodation Services.

For more information visit www.rockybay.org.au