About Community Living Australia
Community Living Australia (CLA) is a not-for-profit organization that provides support and services to individuals living with disabilities. With a team of over 600 dedicated staff, CLA offers individual and group support, specialized services, and accommodation to help their clients and their families achieve their goals and live the life they want.
The Challenge
CLA’s challenge was that they were using a number of ‘stand-alone’, on-premises systems to manage their Client Care, Financial Management, HR, Rostering, Time Sheeting, and Payroll processes. These systems were not integrated, which meant that CLA staff had to manually enter data multiple times, leading to errors and inconsistencies in the data.
The administration of rostering, time & attendance, and payroll was highly labour intensive, with the payroll team having to manually interpret, calculate, and apply very complex award rules for over 600 staff (mostly on the SHADS award). The inefficiencies and risk of non-compliance with awards and agreements were no longer sustainable.
The CLA management team relied on manual spreadsheets to prepare and maintain budget information and did not have access to real time financial reporting, KPI’s or insights to aid their day-to-day decision-making.
“We found ourselves in a situation where our systems had become a barrier to achieving our strategic direction. We were dedicating far too much time and resource just to maintain them, and they were not providing critically needed automation, efficiency gains, insights, or compliance assurance.”
The Solution
As part of a company-wide strategy to upgrade its systems to highly efficient cloud-based solutions, CLA partnered with Progressive Business Technologies (PBT) to implement Sage Intacct Accounting and Financial Management software and KeyPay Payroll software and to integrate them with their new Client Care system (VisualCare) and HRM (Sage People).
This allowed CLA to gain real-time financial management & reporting, with a much-improved dimensional breakdown of their data. The budgeting and reporting capabilities deliver significant time savings and meaningful insights. The management team has dispensed with manual spreadsheets and now has the tools and the time to engage in more collaborative, outcome-focussed decision making.
Keypay Payroll provides CLA with automation of complex award calculations, rostering, shift management, and employee self-service. It has significantly reduced the manual hours previously required by payroll staff and has removed the potential for human error, resulting in high assurance of compliance outcomes.
The integration of these solutions into their Client Care and HR software allows for seamless data transfer between systems, reducing data errors and inefficiency, and providing a clear source of truth for their data. As a result, CLA are now better able to support individuals with disabilities and further their mission of improving their lives.
The Implementation
CLA appointed a dedicated manager, Naomi Newham, who established strong internal project management and governance to oversee the coordination and decision-making required to implement their new systems.
PBT provided the implementation methodology and the systems expertise, and with the highly effective project management from Naomi and the dedicated involvement of CLAs subject matter experts, all project tasks were well planned, coordinated and successfully completed.
“Given the scale of our digital transformation, we needed our implementation partners to provide very clear methodologies, highly collaborative and professional project management, and deep system and technical integration expertise. The PBT team not only delivered on these core requirements, but they also brought a surprisingly good understanding of the NDIS sector and were able to apply that to overcome our unique challenges”
