The United Church of Canada

Continuity, Context and Diversity. Three words that the United Church of Canada (UCC) uses to outline their doctrinal standards. Fitting, then, that when looking for a financial software partner, these are also the key reasons why the United Church selected Altus Canada’s Navision application.

In assessing their priorities for the new software, UCC realized they needed an application that would improve and ensure continuity of reporting for varied levels of departments and personnel, work within the context of a modern and large not-for- profit, and enable a diverse number of departments to still get functionality they needed.

The UCC, led by a General Council, is home to the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. Close to three million Canadians identify themselves as members of the United Church, with over 3,583 individual congregations across the country. In addition to the congregation (or “constituents” as the members are referred to by the UCC), there are 13 regional Conferences, 91 district Presbyteries, and 2,314 local Pastoral Charges.

The ability of the Church to continue growing and serving this large constituent base relies heavily on how financially sound they are. Which is where Ron Olson steps in, as finance director of the UCC. While the decisions made by the finance department must be in accordance with the Church’s management team, The General Council of Canada, ultimately the operation of the church’s financial well being rests on his shoulders and that of his team. Working with Altus, Ron and his department were able to deliver a solution that was flexible enough to address the United Church of Canada’s unique challenges. Just how did Altus provide an ideal solution work for the United Church of Canada? Let’s explore!

Everyone Loves A Challenge…

The United Church of Canada (UCC) is a large and multi-layered not-for-profit organization with unique needs. They needed more than a partner who simply provides a financial software solution. Ron’s team needed an application that would: handle their fundraising arm; offer flexibility for their distribution/fulfillment operation as well as their human resources department; and offer an implementation and staff training service that would be relatively easy for everyone to get involved in.

UCC’s search for accounting software began with the recognition that their existing decade-old accounting software could no longer handle the growth of the Church’s financial administration. One of the chief reasons for initiating the search for new software was the time and resources it took to manage disparate systems (the small IT group spent many hours reconciling them all) Reporting in the legacy financial system was also a concern—it was difficult to find data and navigate and inflexible. Ron wanted an integrated solution that would be less expensive to manage than the different solutions in use for finance, distribution, fundraising and human resources.

The More You Know…

Knowing that four key departments (finance, distribution, fundraising and HR) were going to be impacted by the new application, Altus felt the best approach would be to meet with each department specifically to show the respective personnel how Altus and their solution would benefit, change, and adapt their existing work environments.

Dialogue with each of these key departments would be critical in developing and implementing an optimum solution for UCC. Each end user team would be able to ask department-specific questions as to how this new software would impact them and their team. This would further enable Altus to get a clear understanding of how each department interfaced with the existing application, how the application needed to be tailored specifically for the church’s varied segments and how the front-line individuals would be impacted by changes.

After an extensive and careful review of UCC’s needs from both the management and end users perspective, Altus recommended their Navision product, confident that this was the perfect solution for the church.

It’s Good To Be Flexible…

After meeting with several venders, Ron knew that Altus’ Navigator, powered by Navision was the best for UCC. “Flexibility was key,” said Ron. “Each department operates separately but needs to share information with the other departments on a regular basis. Navigator had the flexibility we were looking for. “Other solutions did not have these characteristics to the same degree.”

With the flexibility of Navigator, Altus knew they would be able to provide a flexible and configurable solution for each department that enabled seamless interaction between the departments for specific tasks:

Finance Department: Handled the preparation and monitoring of the annual budget; implementation and evaluation of financial policies and practices to ensure that financial goals and objectives are met; preparation of monthly, quarterly and annual financial statements, management of accounts receivable and payable; and oversight of the church’s investment portfolio.

Fundraising: UCC’s database recognizes list of people who have different relationships with the Church, donors, volunteers and their history of contributions, what correspondence has been sent to them.

Distribution: Orders, tracks, monitors sales of UCC products (bibles, books, calendars etc).

Human Resources: Oversees 300 employees of the Church, manages job descriptions and benefits. Has to integrate with an external payroll system that pays employees and administration of employee benefit plans.

Checks and Balances…and Checks and Balances…

Armed with the knowledge from their previous meetings, Altus then went through a series of conversations with key personnel that became progressively more detailed.

Altus held a formal kick-off meeting to discuss the “go-forward” process with the entire team. To ensure the product they deliver is a 100% solution fit for each client, there is a great deal of dialogue at this stage. Questions were asked and analyzed from both a development perspective as well as looking ahead at issues that may arise during implementation - like, “missing key people due to holidays”. In addition, the Altus team addressed staff concerns about how the product would impact their job (will my position become obsolete once Navision is installed?) and workload (will this result in more work for me, specifically?).

From the kickoff meetings Altus then went through a series of increasingly detailed conversations with key personnel called Concept Meetings. The process had now moved into a phase where the detailed specifications about what the client had asked for, and what Navision would be delivering were outlined in a Concept Document. The document verified what the system was being built to do and what configuration was required.

Finally, the last of these meetings resulted in a concluding document that formally outlined the specifications so that the developers could configure the solution for the Church.

At every stage of the process questions were asked and encouraged – an ongoing program of checks and balances between Altus and UCC - with an eye to ensuring a smooth implementation when that time arrived.

Ready Set…Go?

Along with encouraging questions throughout the process Altus also encouraged ongoing user testing as well. As opposed to waiting until the system is almost ‘live’, Altus wanted key users to train earlier on in the process so that any issues could be addressed as they went through the product customization.

The team leaders would work using a solution with UCC’s data, to get a good idea of how the application would work in a ”live” environment. This often resulted in new findings, which the Altus developers were quickly able to address and tweak as requested.

At the same time, the real work of taking the Church’s existing database for conversion was being done. Once this part of the conversion was completed, the team would test it again and run non-financial statements against it to make sure everything was correct. One of the biggest aspects of the UCC implementation, from a finance department perspective, was the amount of history contained in many of the accounts. Some journal entries had over 10,000 line items for one entry – so a great deal of accuracy and continuity was required on both sides.

Despite the large amount of data required to be imported for each of the four departments, the task was done quickly and efficiently by the team. Once the environment was set up with all the historical data, the end users were introduced to the new application and Altus began the training portion of the process.

Higher Education…

Altus provided two levels of training to UCC staff. The first was a general overview of the application done in a classroom setting to allow the staff to familiarize themselves with the interface and tools. Navision provides a familiar user interface, recognizable Windows-compliant interface, which helps the new user quickly get comfortable with the overall application.

With the training in the classroom setting completed, Altus went on site with the staff to train them with the actual data. A strong belief in the importance of continuity is why Altus has the same person who implemented the software, also do the on-site training. A significant benefit to the Altus style of training is the opportunity to observe and communicate with the individual end users who actually use the application day after day. This provides Altus with valuable insights and highlights the occasional challenges that may result in some final tweaking.

Finally, once the on-site training was complete, Altus personnel then remained on site during the first week that the application went live to ensure all processes – even those aspects of the application the end user may rarely use day-to-day – were perfectly operational.

Everyone Loves A Happy Ending…

Praising the UCC’s choice of Altus’s Navigator, powered by Navision Ron was keen to stress three main features.

• Flexibility – with both reporting and the custom changes necessary to fit UCC’s business needs;
• Ease of implementation – there was a great fit out of the box and the Altus implementation team knew the product and its capabilities very well; and,
• Integration of multiple databases, which allowed them to drill down and around from the general ledger to DonorVision and other modules.

UCC is now experiencing increased productivity in terms of their ability to do detailed analysis and to write and run detailed reports. Two positions from the finance department were relocated to more revenue gathering areas of Church, savings were realized with respect to maintenance fees and the HR department were able to integrate certain aspects of their system with their outside payroll service thanks to Navigator.

Altus’ Solution for the United Church of Canada:

• Created an interface so the many grants sent out quarterly did not have to be re-keyed into the system.
• Created an interface to the ADP Payroll system so that not only labour charges but also the associated benefits could be properly allocated to the appropriate cost centres.
• Worked with an external consultant so that the Navigator internal documents mirrored the procedures being developed in the Distribution Centre.
• Created an interface to export employee benefit information to an external service.
• Created a way that the offsite sale of books and other United Church materials could be automated on a laptop and synchronized back into the main database as UCC staff took Book Displays out to the many conferences and congregations.
  

It should also be noted that the Altus project manager, really took this project to heart. In a great example of life’s occasional synergies, not only was the United Church one of his clients, the Project Manager has also been a “client” of the Church – as a member of the congregation – for many years.