DXC Eclipse equips Queensland Treasury with Dynamics 365 for Finance

DXC Eclipse, along with the Microsoft Fast Track program, has been engaged by the Queensland Treasury Corporation's (QTC) for its new financial management system, deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance.

QTC is the central financing authority for the Queensland government and in the last financial year, it delivered $300 million worth of returns for government stakeholders and achieved a record $20.5 billion issuance to fund the State's borrowing program despite challenging global conditions.

Following a request for proposal, QTC settled with DXC Eclipse and the Microsoft Fast Track program to deploy the system, which took less than six months, as the FY21 financial year rolled in on 1 July 2020.

The organisation is already using Dynamics 365 Sales for CRM, and now with the Dynamics 365 for Finance it has improved month-end close and reporting timeframes, providing almost real time data for analytics, along with mobile access to the platform.

QTC managing director of finance, data and compliance, Jane Keating said the new system has offered more timely information and links to other tools such as Power BI, offering more analytics and insights.

"We get access to information very early in the piece every morning, as opposed to waiting half a day for that information to get processed through our other systems, which means that clients can get their information much more quickly," she said.

The organisation has about 28 users of the platform and all QTC's 220 employees can also use the expense claim application, which is now handled electronically, replacing reconciliation spreadsheets and paper processing.

QTC's clients will also have access to more self-serve analytics and dashboards across QTC's finance data set - dubbed Accounting IQ - which was not possible with the legacy platform.

"Moving to this platform it was very clear it is actually going to be a lot cheaper for us, and we have certainly increased our productivity internally since adopting this," she said.

"There's a bit of time spent developing the reports that we need at the moment, but I think once we've done all of it, it will deliver more powerful analytics and insights to management."

The latest project is one portion of QTC's Microsoft transformation journey, which kicked off six years ago and now includes plans to potentially introduce Azure cognitive services to scan emails for PO numbers, match those, and automate payments and reconciliations where possible.

QTC is also keen to explore Azure Purview, which promises a unified view of all data across an enterprise, as well as Azure Synapse Analytics in the future.

QTC director of enterprise information and technology, Kristan Bowen said the decision to use Microsoft public cloud and other technologies opens the door to a broad array of trusted and secure services.

"We're constantly reviewing workloads for their suitability to be shifted to Microsoft's public cloud" he says.