Movember Foundation replaces spreadsheets with new financial system

Board International has teamed up with Movember Foundation, a charity for improving the health of men.

Movember will deploy the Board performance management software platform, replacing a complex mix of spreadsheets and manual processes.

"We were doing everything in Excel spreadsheets," says Movember commercial manager, Simone Corner.

"While this had worked when we were small, as we grew it had become ever more unwieldy.

"The last time I created a budget, it involved pulling together more than 500 different worksheets for consolidation."

A decision was made to find an alternative system for handling the tasks of financial budgeting, reporting and forecasting.

After examining a number of options, a decision was made in June 2016 to deploy Board.

"We could clearly see Board had the capabilities we were seeking.

"We were particularly attracted by the way in which it essentially provided a blank canvas that could be adjusted to meet our specific requirements."

With the system now in place, Corner explains Movember now has "one source of truth" that ensures reports provided to senior managers are based on the most up-to-date data available.

Corner says the time required to complete the annual budgeting process has been reduced significantly while Board also allows data from Movember's console application, which tracks donor activity, to be easily combined with data from the organisation's NetSuite ERP system.

"Board gives us what is essentially a real-time view into our operations around the world," continues Corner.

"This is something that was simply impossible to achieve when we relied on spreadsheets and manual processing."

The Movember team configured a cloud based platform, to which budgeting and forecasting components were also added, together with a foreign exchange conversion tool.

Corner says the platform has significantly improved the way in which data is collected from each country to create financial reports.

"We work in a wide range of countries and deal with multiple currencies and exchange rates, but everything is combined and converted into Australian dollars for reporting.

Corner explains that finance managers in each global location can input their details directly into the Board platform and make them available.

"We can now also easily combine different legal entities using Board which saves a lot of manual processing.

"Overall, the difference it has made to our day-to-day operations has been very significant."

Movember has been in action for 14 years, and is now active in 21 countries and has raised more than $770 million to help fund 1200 different health-related projects.