About
Fairfield City is 32km south-west of the Sydney Central Business District. It covers an area of 102 square km, incorporating 27 suburbs.
Council has over 240,000 rateable properties and employs approximately 1,100 staff. Fairfield City Council continues maintaining a strong, sustainable financial position and meeting all of the financial benchmarks set by the State Government.
The Challenge
Council’s newly appointed Finance Manager was given the task to select and implement a computerised financial budgeting system to fulfil Council’s legislative reporting requirements whilst providing comprehensive financial planning and reporting to all stakeholders.
The Solution
Council implemented MAGIQ Performance to reduce their manual efforts and improve their budgeting and financial planning capabilities.
The Benefits
With MAGIQ Performance, Council’s financial data is managed as a single source of truth and the budgeting process is performed systematically in a controlled and auditable environment.
”The obvious benefit will be having a relational database, as a single source of truth rather than having several spreadsheets floating around, with staff making changes that we have to manually consolidate afterwards. I am confident there will be a huge improvement in our budgeting process.
“As an example, I find that the ability to make an inquiry is very simple in that you don’t have to run a script, you can just navigate through the tree structure, select the area that you want to focus on, and define the relevant parameters. The response is very, very quick.
“It’s a good system. In terms of distribution and collaboration, one of the big benefits of the solution is the ability to use workflows so the budgeting process can be performed systematically, in a controlled and auditable environment. And whilst the previous manual process was ‘doing the job’, our financial budgeting was reliant on detailed reconciliations to minimise the risk of errors.”