Founded in 1956, the Catholic Development Fund (CDF) provides financial services to schools, parishes, aged care and healthcare providers, and social services providers. It offers funding for community projects and constructions, through to tailored lending, credit cards and payments options.
Catholic Development Fund automates corporate card reconciliation with Atturra
Client
Catholic Development Fund
Scope of work
Industry
Financial Services
Partner
Boomi
About the Client
Business Opportunity
CDF delivers innovative and cost-effective solutions to its customers, however administering and managing financial services can be a complex feat for recipients. This is because of the volumes of information those customers are required to handle, which is typically conducted through labour-intensive manual processes, and often across vast numbers of stakeholders.
CDF recognised the opportunity to drive further value for its customers by automating these complex financial processes and creating uniformity throughout.
The Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS) is one such example. MACS operates 293 schools across Victoria, and leans on CDF for not only financial support, but its ability to simplify data consolidation for card reconciliation. Previously handled as individual instances across the large cohort of schools – all operating multiple, different technology and administrative environments – it took up to 90 days to reconcile simple purchase transactions.
Atturra Solution
To streamline MACS’s corporate card reconciliation process, CDF teamed up with Atturra to build a highly integrated solution to handle the complexity.
During the pilot program, Atturra helped CDF introduce and optimise its use of the Boomi integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Atturra leveraged its long-standing data and integration expertise to connect CDF’s core systems, include a banking system, FlexiPurchase expense management, AWS Secure File Transfer Service, and Microsoft SharePoint.
“Every business comes with its own set of financial requirements and technology tools. We can’t rely on cookie cutter solutions. Atturra enabled us to build unique processes, tailored to each of our customers’ needs, through Boomi’s integration platform.”
Jukka Rinta
Executive Manager, Product at CDF
Outcomes achieved
With its Boomi-connected environment, CDF started manipulating files for fiscal processes, before taking a more strategic approach by designing automated processes for MACS. Atturra has enabled CDF to automatically cross-check financial information against differing enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms used across MACS’ cohort of schools, with information supplied through API payloads and fit-for-purpose content that bundle purchase transactions.
“After being in operation for just three months, we have already seen vast improvements to the speed at which MACS can reconcile transactions,” said Rinta. “Now, up to 80 per cent of transactions are compared against the ledger within the same month. This is a huge win for governance and provides significant reduction in admin burden.”
According to Rinta, CDF’s work with Atturra has not only optimised the way it provides financial services, but boosted the company’s credentials as a technical provider too. “There is a need for integration across each of our customers, but they usually lack the in-house expertise to do it,” said Rinta.
The success of the MACS project has led CDF to explore ways in which it can replicate the process across the unique needs of its broader customer base regardless of the industries in which they operate.
Jason Frost, Executive General Manager, Data and Integration at Atturra, said, “Bookkeeping for one business can be complex, let alone for 293 operating across multiple environments. Atturra is proud to have helped facilitate a boost in efficiency for CDF’s customers, while assisting CDF make its corporate card product even more competitive.”
