TechnologyOne's solution automates processes for financial institution in Victoria

Bank First has reduced generation of monthly reporting by one week using TechnologyOne's enterprise solution

Case study highlights

  • Reduced monthly reporting by 1 week
  • Improved integrity and accuracy of reporting
  • Enterprise-wide control of financial information

Challenge

Bank First (formerly known as Victoria Teachers Mutual Bank) was  largely reliant on manual Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets. Data entry and analysis was tedious, time consuming and prone to error.

The organisation was spending 80 per cent of its time preparing information for reports and just 20 per cent analysing the data. Realising this trend had to be reversed, Bank First went out to tender looking for accounting software that would help automate processes and free up staff time for other management tasks.

Solution

Bank First purchased TechnologyOne Financials, as its suitability for the mutuals industry meant it matched the needs of VTMB.

TechnologyOne Financials delivers enterprise-wide control and integration of financial information. The software's versatile reporting and enquiry tools enables the finance department, management team and directors to easily interpret financial information essential to strategic decision-making and improving the bottom line.

The bank has since implemented TechnologyOne Supply Chain, to automate purchase management and TechnologyOne Enterprise Budgeting as a fully integrated budgeting and forecasting solution.

Outcome

By using TechnologyOne's software to automate processes, Bank First now spends less time on gathering, entering and reconciling data, and more time on data analysis.

TechnologyOne Financials' reporting capabilities has allowed Bank First to reduce the time taken to generate monthly reports from two weeks to one. The integrity and accuracy of reporting has also increased significantly.

"Being a mutual, our purpose is to serve members. In that regard, accurate reporting and financial management provide us with timely information for strategic decision making, thus benefiting our members," says David Percival, Executive Manager Finance at Bank First.

Executive Manager Finance
Bank First

Accurate reporting and financial management provide us with timely information for strategic decision making, thus benefiting our members.

Perspective

Bank First is a customer-owned bank, with 200 employees, more than 106,000 customers and over $1.8 billion in assets.

Bank First was previously using Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets for all its accounting processes, which was time consuming, tedious to update and prone to error. Formulae could easily be deleted or overwritten, compromising the data's integrity and rendering reports unreliable and quickly out of date.

To reduce inefficiencies resulting from this manual spreadsheet approach, Bank First went to market seeking an integrated financials software that could automate processes.

Bank First needed a high performance accounting solution for accurate reporting and financial management. The solution also needed to integrate with their core banking system, Ultradata's Ultracs system, so that daily data files generated could be imported and analysed with little effort.

The bank ultimately selected TechnologyOne as preferred tender over competitor Infor Sun Systems. Implementing TechnologyOne Financials, Supply Chain and Enterprise Budgeting as an integrated enterprise solution, Bank First now has access to intuitive, real-time financial information.

TechnologyOne Financials' simple reporting capabilities have also allowed Bank First to easily and quickly create customised reports and halve its reporting time.

"Once created, the reports can be attached to the TechnologyOne menu and are accessible with a single mouse click," says Sharon Spiteri, Finance Systems Analyst at Bank First.

"There are lots of reporting tools out there that require the skills of a database administrator, however, if you possess intermediate to advanced Excel skills you can easily create reports in XLOne," she says.

Spotlight

TechnologyOne's software has enabled Bank First to make huge efficiency savings, allowing it to focus on providing superior service and better deals for its customers

Using embedded workflow in TechnologyOne Financials, Bank First has automated the invoice approval process. All invoices are now scanned and electronically forwarded via workflow to managers for cost coding and approval. This has eliminated the reliance of internal mail, the possibility of misplacing invoices in transit and bottlenecking of manual approval and overdue invoices.

"The TechnologyOne solution is incredibly easy to use and extremely intuitive. The search functionality is amazing, so you can easily find what you are looking for if you don't know where it resides in the menu structure," says Ms Spiteri.

To further refine its budgeting and reporting processes, Bank First implemented TechnologyOne Enterprise Budgeting, which has successfully eliminated the need for spreadsheets.

TechnologyOne Enterprise Budgeting has decentralised the budget process, allowing Bank First executive managers to easily and accurately project their budget at a departmental level. Once saved, budgets can be instantaneously broken down at a consolidated level, which is essential to management and Board reporting requirements.

About Bank First

Bank First (formerly known as Victoria Teachers Mutual Bank), started in 1972 with 48 customers and $480 in start-up capital. Today, the organisation has 200 employees, more than 106,000 customers and over $1.9 billion in assets.

Bank First is a customer-owned bank, and is the the only financial institution in Victoria focusing on people working in education and their families.

Bank First website

Publish date

09 Feb 2015

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