Waterloo Catholic School Board Embraces Innovation and Simplifies Budgeting

The school board was also concerned about security issues around its existing solution. The product had been slated for an upgrade for six years. As the upgrade was yet to materialize, they felt the DOS-based solution was not providing the level of security Waterloo Catholic required for its confidential information.

Considering these needs, the organization sought a business application solution that would be easy to use, cost-effective, and meet its complex reporting requirements efficiently and securely.

Drill-down functionality and on-the-fly filters in the Sparkrock solution helped WCDSB transform budget tracking documents from passive summaries to practical instruments that offer precise statements with fully updated information.

The school board now has complete financial insight across the organization to make timely and informed decisions—with data from the current fiscal year and previous years. But the feature of the solution that made it stand out furthest above competitive products was that it works like other familiar Microsoft products, helping reduce the time required to learn how to use the software and fuel WCDSB’s productivity.

Budget management was simplified for WCDSB with the help of Sparkrock’s Finance solution and cash management features. The solution automates bank account management tasks and the entire check-writing process. The school board has more visibility into its budgetary processes with bank reconciliation tools and bank account statistics reports.

With the ability to automatically import cleared cheques into the business management system, tracking budget spending has become easier for the organization, while data entry requirements have significantly decreased.

The ease-of-use of the new solution allowed the school board’s staff to generate more reports in a significantly streamlined and quicker way and helped them make sense of the results.

Where previously, staff members looking for specific types of information would have needed the assistance of an experienced report writer to generate a more complex report, today, they are comfortable performing such tasks independently.

WCDSB has not looked back since their original purchase from Sparkrock in 2004. Over 20 years later, WCDSB still believes Sparkrock, the right choice for a sound financial and accounting management system for their board and the 55 schools they service.