Shire of Broome delivers more efficient budgeting and reporting framework with MAGIQ
The Shire of Broome in Western Australia has invested in the MAGIQ Performance software application to deliver a more efficient budgetary process and organisation-wide access to financial reporting.
The Shire of Broome is located in the southwest Kimberley in the far north of Western Australia and delivers services to a community of approximately 17,000 people. The region has experienced rapid and continued growth over the last decade to become one of the fastest growing towns in the state.
MAGIQ Performance is a suite of highly sophisticated and easy to use budgeting, reporting and strategic planning software. The software sits across the Shire of Broome’s core business system, the IT Vision Synergy application, to provide management with easy access to budgetary data and financial reporting.
According to Lachlan Dodds, Senior Finance Officer at the Shire of Broome, the decision to implement MAGIQ Performance was driven by the opportunity to achieve considerable time-savings and to reduce business risk.
“Previously we relied on a series of Excel spreadsheets to prepare the budget. A spreadsheet was provided to 30 Responsible Officers across Council for completion and these were then returned to Finance to build the overall organisation budget.
“Naturally this process involved double-handling of data, which increased the opportunity for errors and we reached a point where there was just too much risk involved.”
In order to meet the timeframes for the 2016/2017 Budget, Council chose to take advantage of the initial training provided by MAGIQ Software to ensure each of the Responsible Officers could input their budgets directly into the system.
“MAGIQ is very intuitive and easy to use and we’ve had plenty of positive feedback from staff.”
The Shire has initially implemented MAGIQ Reporting across its financial data to provide managers with quick and easy access to meaningful financial information.
Lachlan commented that while Council’s core business system also provides reporting functionality, it is by comparison a tool that requires the accounting knowledge and skill only found within the finance team.
“With MAGIQ you simply press a button. The software is very accessible and will add great value across the organisation. We are already seeing a number of our Responsible Officers jumping on to the system and running their own reports, which is much more efficient for them and saves our finance team considerable time as well.”
According to Lachlan ease of use and support were key factors in the software selection process.
“As a remote Council we have a fairly high turnover of staff and we need a system that new staff will be able to learn and adopt fairly quickly. Access to reliable product support is also very important to us and we’ve been impressed with the knowledge of the MAGIQ Software team and their ability to quickly resolve any issues.”
*Copy supplied by MAGIQ Software
