Provident Capital moves its financials to a new Microsoft Dynamics platform

Intergen installed a seamless, integrated financial and accounting platform using Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

The problem

What do you do if your company’s growth cannot be supported by your current accounting and financial system? What steps do you take when your system isn’t fully integrated, doesn’t have the capacity to handle increased volumes of transactions and can’t automatically produce reports? These were the challenges that Provident Capital Limited (PCL) had to address earlier this year in planning for its new financial year.

PCL is one of Australia's leading diversified finance and investment groups. It creates and manages high-quality, fixed-interest investments and innovative mortgage lending. PCL Financial Controller, Carl Kennedy, says the company was projecting future growth but knew its current accounting and financial system had reached its limitations.

“We had outgrown the current system and, with limited capability for reporting, providing relevant and timely information to the team was becoming inefficient."

“We were looking for a company and software system that could deliver seamless financial and accounting processes reporting flexibility.”

The old system required a lot of manual intervention. Carl says some of this work stemmed from a cumbersome file-based structure that required manual maintenance.

“Our separate legal entities meant maintaining separate files, which doubled the transaction time when reconciling and agreeing to intercompany balances. Historical data was only available for the previous and current year, requiring staff to manually load and interrogate historical data.”

Another issue was that the old system didn’t have the capacity to process large volumes of transactions, resulting in a backlog. And with growth projected, PCL needed a system that could handle greater volumes of work.

With growth being across diversified lines of business, another important performance gap was the old system’s reporting limitations. Carl says staff had to generate the majority of the company’s reports through Excel.

“We were after a system that consolidated this financial, reporting and accounting activity, making it easily accessible, flexible and efficiently managed.”

The solution

PCL engaged Intergen to implement a solution during May and June 2011 ready for the new financial year in July 2011. Intergen installed a seamless, integrated financial and accounting platform using Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Intergen account manager Mark Trotter says the project was a ‘fairly vanilla’ implementation. “We kept it that way for the initial implementation to ensure we met the deadline of 30 June.”

Carl says PCL can now spend more time on analytical work.

“Previously we were doing a lot of compiling and customising of reports. This was taking too long and was creating bottlenecks along the way.

“We now have a seamless software platform that gives us access to all data and allows us to create reports within an all-in-one system. This saves us time and creates capacity for the finance team to add more value. We no longer have to wait to upload and construct accounting and financial reports – they can all be generated automatically now. Plus we can process large volumes of transactions efficiently.”

In terms of the project itself, Carl says: “Intergen delivered on time, ahead of schedule and within cost – which was great for us. We had a tight deadline and this was met.”

The new financial year was truly welcomed by PCL as a fresh start.