Case Study: AHURI

At Velixo, we have a thing for businesses that make a difference to communities; so it was with immense pleasure that we sat down with Peter Cocks, Business Manager and Head of Corporate Services at AHURI to talk about their great Not-for-Profit business and their use of Velixo.

About AHURI

AHURI is a national independent research network with an expert not-for-profit research management company, AHURI Limited, at its centre. Their primary purpose is the delivery of high-quality, peer reviewed primary research across housing, homelessness, cities, and urban policy arenas; disseminating findings to government, industry, and the community; and creating engagement opportunities with the AHURI evidence-base.

AHURI operates with a humble team of 25 employees, including 3 people in the Finance department, however it drives significant impact in the community. AHURI focuses on Finance and Accounting for government contracts, consulting work, and also manages large national  conferences in Australia, such as: the National Housing Conference and Australian Homelessness conference.

Meet Peter

Peter is AHURI’s Business Manager and Head of Corporate Services, he’s an Excel power user and has been a Velixo enthusiast ever since its adoption at AHURI. His role encompasses a broad range of financial and accounting responsibilities like managing grant acquittals for government contracts, deferred revenue calculations. He also oversees the financial aspects of the National Housing conference  – a significant event in Australia with over 1,000 attendees, generating over $1,000,000 of revenue.

Key Challenges

AHURI has been a user of MYOB software for many years. The entire business operated on MYOB Greentree but started significantly outgrowing the system. Two years ago, they migrated to MYOB Acumatica, and used the services of MYOB for ther data migration to their new ERP. AHURI went through a thorough research phase to eventually select MYOB Acumatica – this provided their business with the richness of a fully-fledged ERP platform.

While on Greentree, Peter and the AHURI business were used to working with Finance Reporting EE (Greentree’s Financial Excel add-in). As part of their migration, the first thing their business required was an Excel reporting experience. Velixo was introduced and made available at the same time as their MYOB Acumatica Go-Live, two years ago. The team at AHURI uses Velixo not just for all the Excel benefits and Financials reporting, they leverage the entire range of Velixo functionality, i.e. financial reporting, operational reporting, budgeting & forecasting, report distribution by email, and Generic Writeback to push their data to MYOB Acumatica from within Excel.

In this case study, we deep dive on AHURI’s experience with Velixo and what drives significant efficiency boost for the AHURI team.

• Lack of Excel reporting features – with a team of Excel power users and several reports built on Excel over the years, AHURI required financial reporting in Excel for MYOB Acumatica; but not just standard Excel. They needed an Excel tool that was fully integrated with MYOB Acumatica.
• Sharing reports – There was no option to distribute reports to end users in an automated, efficient and secured manner. It required considerable time and effort to share this information.
• Inefficient data entry processes – routine tasks like creating adjustment Journal entries, bank reconciliation and month-end data entries were difficult and time-consuming for AHURI on both MYOB Greentree and MYOB Acumatica.

The Velixo Difference

With their Services partners, MYOB and Alchemex; AHURI discovered that they could achieve all their requirements, and that there was much more in the box with Velixo:

• Self-Service Financial reporting – Peter was able to rapidly rebuild all his critical Excel-based Finance reports with Velixo. In his own words: “The learning curve wasn’t very steep.” The flexibility of Excel, coupled with the real-time nature of Velixo provided Peter’s team of 3 with the right tool to own their work and be self-sufficient.
• Automated Report Distribution – Velixo’s distribution feature allows Peter’s team to distribute reports by email to end-users with the click of a button. Reports’ data is automatically filtered based on the end user’s permission in MYOB Acumatica and users only interact with an offline version of the reports that are free of any Velixo formula. This means no additional manual work needed and fully automated workflows at the end of the month!

“We just press a button, and the invoices are produced. About 240 invoices a year at the press of a button. That’s a massive boost to productivity!” says Peter.

• Data entry automation – Velixo’s seamless integration between Excel and MYOB Acumatica allowed Peter’s team to see substantial productivity gains, especially during the end-of-month close. Using Journal Writeback feature, it streamlined tasks like generating account balances and uploading journals, which led to considerable time savings and increased efficiency. Peter’s team saw a “50% increase in productivity” and a 75% efficiency boost just for Peter.
• Efficient Budgeting & Forecasting – using the flexibility of Excel and Velixo together, Peter uploads updated budgets and forecasts right from Excel using Velixo. Budget Writeback is used to update Rolling budgets, every month, along with revised forecasts throughout the year. This has simplified and automated AHURI’s budgeting and forecasting processes, automating tasks that would previously have been manual, error-prone and time-consuming.
• Data analysis – Peter uses the Velixo-deployed Generic Inquiries with the GI function to analyze data for many other modules of MYOB Acumatica, directly in Excel. He has never had to create his own custom Generic Inquiries and Excel provides a friendlier and better environment for data analysis. In his own words: “We think we spend more time in Excel than we spend in MYOB Acumatica.”

Favourite features

Peter achieved significant productivity boost with Velixo and highlighted his favourite features:

• Journal Writeback – This feature enables the team at AHURI to automate the creation of Adjustment entries and account balances from Excel to MYOB Acumatica, as Journal transactions.
• Velixo’s Generic Inquiries and the GI function – Creating custom GIs require technical expertise that would be challenging for Peter’s team. Velixo’s GIs solved this and enabled them to analyse any data right from Excel using the GI function.
• Distribution List – Peter’s team relies on Velixo’s report distribution to automatically send filtered and offline reports to multiple end users. Distribution Lists let users generate reports as PDF or Excel files with or without formulas, and distribute them to users, with a single click. Additional options include the ability to select only specific sheets of a workbook, or filter reports at generation time (by company, branch, division, financial period, etc).

What’s next for AHURI

“We’ve been getting into dashboards now because we’ve got more time to explore different ways of presenting the data, thanks to Velixo.”

Peter’s team is focusing on data analysis and creating more dashboards in Excel. Because of the simplicity of extracting data from MYOB Acumatica using Velixo, AHURI is working on a new  project: creating new Velixo reports that they call “data models” that would be used to feed Microsoft Power BI, to produce highly interactive dashboards.