Case Study
ApprovalMax and Xero enable a leading NFP to optimise spending management and facilitate audits Find out how Xero and its pre-integrated approval workflow app support the largest agribusiness event in the Southern Hemisphere...
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he New Zealand National Fieldays Society is a not-for-profit organisation and a registered charity. It is also the owner and host of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest agribusiness exhibition known as Fieldays. Over the first few years, the Society experienced great success and soon realised that their cornerstone event gained interest not just locally but was recognised on a global scale. Fieldays now 50 years old hosts more than 130,000 people over the 4-day event, attracts individuals from over 40 different countries, and contributes over $530m of economic benefit to the New Zealand economy each year. What was going wrong After joining the Society and taking over the role as CFO in July 2015, I quickly identified shortcomings in the Society’s financial processes and systems. Within my first month with the Society, I saw a significant portion of the Society’s cash reserves depleted. The pace of expenditures and the immediate rate of cash burn in this first month alone took me by absolute surprise. Soon it became clear that these challenges were rooted in the 96 / Issue 15
processes and systems in place at that time. They were inefficient and made it extremely hard to maintain a reasonable quality of financial data or establish a sufficient approval decision control. One of the process fallouts was the practice of using the General Expenses code for coding expenditure, meaning there was no way to properly authorise the Society’s expenditure. On top of that, the financial reporting was done in Word with data copied from Excel and then collated as a PDF file. Fast forward a couple of months, I had been in the job just under 90 days and had developed a budget for the ensuing financial year, having spent numerous hours reviewing the transactions in the General Expenses account. It was also year end, and auditors were due in the next few days. It was at that point that I realised that dramatic change was required to move the Society forward. The change was radical That’s when I told the finance team: “We are moving to Xero and it’s happening tomorrow”. I signed up to Xero, migrated the accounts,
@ApprovalMax
Anthony Burman, CFO, New Zealand National Fieldays Society Inc. Anthony is an experienced leader with a proven record in leading change, through system automation and innovative process design. Anthony is more than your typical accountant, with a passion that lies deep with designing organisational strategies utilising technology solutions to enhance organisations performance and profitability. Anthony graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Business Management Studies from the University of Waikato.
linked the bank accounts and literally overnight we were ready to go. This was a business with 35 staff, hundreds of Purchase Orders, thousands of Sales Invoices, and just as many Bills. Xero immediately became the single source of truth. Suddenly I could see the daily cash balances and manage Purchase Orders, Invoicing, and Bills. I trained the staff on how to code expenditures to anywhere but General Expenses. And it was a success! However, we still required the ability to implement how the delegated approval decisions should have been made in the decommissioned system. This meant approval workflows had to be simple for the end users but complex enough to deal with the existing delegate authorities – specific to our business needs. Plus, we needed a capable tool to address our growing compliance and regulatory requirements. And that’s when we discovered ApprovalMax. Single point of control ApprovalMax is natively preintegrated with Xero and
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