Queensland Police Citizens Youth Welfare Association (QPCYWA) has become the latest organisation to sign up for TechnologyOne Cloud to integrate its Finance, Payroll and Human Resources (HR) systems across its 54 branches and more than 700 staff.

The not-for-profit (NFP) organisation, which has an annual turnover in excess of $60 million and helps 50,000 young Queenslanders every year, was managing more than 60 individual MYOB databases and an equivalent number of HR spreadsheets.

Following 12 months of due diligence in which three vendors were shortlisted, QPCYWA chose TechnologyOne to implement its OneCommunity solution on its Cloud platform.  The full implementation and rollout to all branches is expected to take 12 to 18 months.

QPCYWA General Manager – Finance Anthony Abrahams said the not-for-profit wanted to manage its resources more efficiently, minimise risk, improve governance and find a partner to grow with in the future.

“TechnologyOne ticked all the boxes. Firstly its Cloud offering meant we could have a single platform hosted in Australia which involves only one contract with one vendor who will manage everything for us rather than having to deal with lots of resellers,” Mr Abrahams said.

“Using the Cloud also means we do not have to implement software at every site or pay for hardware, back-up, power and so on, and we expect to make considerable cost savings in this area in the future.  We also believe TechnologyOne’s platform is more advanced than others on the market and will be a key part of our future planning.

“Secondly, the OneCommunity software was developed with TechnologyOne’s large NFP customer base including The Red Cross and The Salvation Army so it requires close to no customisation to fit our business model,” he said.

“The NFP sector has specialist requirements, such as managing volunteers and tracking whether our workers have up-to-date police checks, that TechnologyOne has built into its software.”

Mr Abrahams added that the fully integrated software would mean QPCYWA had access to ‘one version of the truth’, better business intelligence and more transparent risk.

“While we will have a single platform the branches will still have autonomy so they can continue to act locally, deal with their own suppliers and make their own decisions about what works best for them,” he said.

With a small IT team of 3 staff, Abrahams is keen to look to the cloud to handle as much of the organisation's infrastructure as possible. The charity has a limited budget to provide IT infrastructure to support staff , many of whom are still working on Windows XP desktops.

"XP only supports up to Internet Explorer 7 so many need to use Firefox to get around this. We are moving to standardised Dell Windows 7/IE10 desktops over three years so we can handle services delivered via HTML5."

The TechOne enterprise app will be delivered via Citrix so it is able to be managed using existing desktop hardware.

Eventually the current network file share will migrate to a document management system

Currently Policies and Procedures are stored on a SharePoint Foundation intranet hosted on an external data centre along with Exchange Server.

QPCYWA is looking to Adobe FormsCentral as a cost-effective way to replace manual data entry for TechnologyOne's cloud apps with hosted PDF Web forms.