The City of Whittlesea in Melbourne has invested in the MAGIQ Performance Suite to deliver on the strategic goal of implementing a single enterprise-wide reporting solution.
MAGIQ Performance is a powerful and flexible suite of budgeting, financial & strategic planning, regulatory and operational reporting software. The City of Whittlesea currently uses MAGIQ to report across more than 40 organisational datasets, with 250 staff using the software daily.
MAGIQ Performance sits across the City of Whittlesea’s core business system, the Civica Authority application, to provide a single, unified reporting environment. Council has also achieved significant improvements in efficiency and data consistency by replacing a number of spreadsheet-based, departmental reporting processes with MAGIQ Performance.
According to Emily Phillips, Strategy and Systems Accountant, City of Whittlesea the key business driver has been to achieve a single version of the truth across the organisation.
“With MAGIQ implemented across the entire organisation, we can be very confident that we are basing our business decisions on a single, accurate source of the truth.
“By ensuring the quality and accuracy of the data, we are empowering managers to make highly-informed decisions, which improves overall business efficiency, as well as reducing our business risk.”
Emily is able to cite a number of examples where MAGIQ has enabled Council to achieve significant time-savings and cost efficiencies.
Greater transparency around the organisation’s utility billing arrangements and expenditure is one recent example that has saved Council a considerable portion of its overall budget.
“Given the size and geographical spread of the City, our expenditure on utilities such as water, electricity and telecommunications is quite significant.
“Using MAGIQ we have been able to much more accurately analyse our utility bills and by doing this we have delivered an annual cost saving of $315,000.”
With more than 1200 staff, labour costs are another significant area of expenditure for Council. Each operational manager has access to regular, highly accurate reporting on their labour costs, which means they can carefully consider and manage costs to fully optimise their labour budgets.
“This financial year we achieved a result of within 1% of budget for labour costs, which is a direct result of the data quality and transparency MAGIQ provides to our line managers,” said Emily.
Replacing a manual spreadsheet-based system to comply with reporting requirements for fees and charges has also delivered significant productivity improvements across Council.
“We’ve implemented an automated process to report on Fees and Charges using MAGIQ,” said Emily. “Managers can now much more easily maintain and analyse their year on year data and the system also automatically updates the income accounts within the General Ledger.”
“We estimate we’re saving around 2-3 weeks of staff time by completing this process in MAGIQ, which is an excellent productivity improvement.”
*Copy supplied by MAGIQ
