WDEA Works: more support for the disability community

For a long time, WDEA Work had been making do with an older system. And that didn’t just mean more manual processes – the overloaded system itself was slowing things down even more.

“When it came to entering transactions, it could take two minutes just to save one transaction – what we had was no longer a workable solution,” explains Liz.

The other issue was how easily transactions could be deleted, which, come audit time, was less than ideal.

“We needed something that was quick, didn’t hold up our staff, provided a clear number trail and could easily reverse transactions if required,” says Liz.

Even though the organisation knew what was needed, when they went looking, it took a while for them to find the right solution. She says the options felt limited.

“We either shifted to a ‘band-aid fix’ solution, which might have seen us through for a bit, or the alternatives were highly complex solutions that were more money than we were willing to pay,” she says.

A colleague of hers spoke to someone at a work conference and mentioned MYOB Advanced Business – and that was it for Liz.

When it came down to it, MYOB Advanced Business had what Liz was looking for.

For a start, it’s cloud-based, crucial for the widely spread team.

“Head office is where all the finance staff are, but we also have site managers and regional managers spread out across our other sites that need access,” explains Liz.

The platform would work seamlessly with WDEA Works’ other software for client management, POS and NDIS support. Liz saw that it could also make light work of sub-account level reports, with the help of a reporting add-on, Velixo.

As an NDIS provider, WDEA Works pays bills on behalf of clients. With 500 clients on the books, any one day could see them paying upwards of 100 bills – you can bet that got very complex, very quickly.

“Before we implemented MYOB Advanced Business, one of my team members was manually typing in NDIS support-related data. At the time our client numbers were small, but within 12-18 months, our numbers skyrocketed from 30 to 500,” explains Liz.

MYOB Advanced Business didn’t just take that pain away, it also set the organisation up to be able to help even more people.

“The growth we’ve seen with our plan management service is big – MYOB Advanced Business has essentially put more money in us by helping us branch out and provide the service to more areas.”

With a new system, Liz has seen simplified processes and tasks become automated, which means staff can now focus on other things.

“We benefit from seamless invoice processing and data import functionality because MYOB Advanced Business and our client management software are integrated,” says Liz. “It wouldn’t have been possible to continue that manually.”

MYOB Advanced Business was implemented by system partner, Axsys, with their Director Jason Ransley adding, “Thanks to MYOB Advanced Business, time-consuming processes and tasks are now automated, which leaves WDEA more time to focus on delivering quality services to their clients. This is a massive benefit for any NDIS provider.”

Systems for their social enterprise businesses are better connected and easier to use too. Liz says they’ll continue to add more integrations so they can become even more efficient.

“We’re in the process of completing other integration projects, like adding a service module for our lawnmowing business to help keep track of jobs and automatically invoice when a job is complete.

“Our primary business is employment, so the next step is to bring in an integration that imports our income for our NBIS clients automatically,” Liz adds.

And how are staff handling the change? Mixed reviews like for any form of change, Liz jokes, but overall “they’ve embraced the change.”