Case study

Sole Motive is an established and growing business in event management, publishing and retail in Australia which involves its people working in a number of separate locations.

The company uses MYOB for its accounting and for some years looked to find time a cost effective tool to enable our managers to develop and be responsible for delivering on their budgets for each business unit.

Greg Scanlan, the bookkeeper at Sole Motive, has a background in business and finance administration and is a registered BAS Agent, tried to improve the budgeting function using a mix of spreadsheets and report writers, however it had many drawbacks such as the extensive time required each month, and holding the rest of the system and users up due to the need to make adjustments and the sheer time it took to do that. The company’s efforts using other tools which were predominantly spreadsheet based were no more successful particularly in the aspect of not handling distributed budgets and consolidation at individual job level. “We were spending excessive hours just trying to massage data which meant a loss of productive time on the part of managers and delays in getting our results".

"We came across Cerebiz (Budget/Jobs Modules) and immediately found the ease of entering budgets at account and job levels, which automatically builds the overall budget, was well received by our staff. We saved many hours. In addition, it provides much better facilities at the time of developing the budget, such as the ability to add notes to explain a particular figure. Now the managers develop the budgets for their own areas, against which they will be measured. The forecasting facility enables the forward result to incorporate actuals for the completed months as well is forecasts for the remaining months, providing much better management insight into likely end of period results. The ability to drill down and see who is contributing to the profit at a job level is a big plus", said Greg.

“It’s simple and powerful to use and is saving me 10 to 12 hours a month that I used to spend on reporting. In addition, it saves me 50 to 60 hours per year that are used to spend on budget preparation. And any changes during the year now takes just minutes as against hours previously. The facility to manage budgets and freeze them once finalised and bring them to live at predetermined future dates so the whole system updates with new budgets and reports will show new budget values etc. save so much time and is top-notch."

Greg concluded, “we are very happy with the overall results, and that it is saving us considerable time, resources and money. We’ve also seen the power of the underlying Business Intelligence engine that drives Cerebiz for its users. There is much more there for us to grow into. The key things we like about it are that it automatically synchronises with the latest MYOB data, that we can access our data anywhere and anytime through an Internet browser, and that it is easy for end-users to be immediately productive with Cerebiz as they do not need any technical knowledge".