“Since moving to Business Central, we have created a significant number of efficiencies across all financial areas of our organisation.”

The Heart Foundation is New Zealand’s heart charity, leading the fight against our country’s single biggest killer – heart disease. Thanks to their generous donors and supporters, the Heart Foundation helps New Zealanders enjoy longer, healthier lives. Through investment in life-saving heart research, prevention programmes, and support for those with heart disease, the Heart Foundation impacts thousands of lives each day.

As a registered charity, the Heart Foundation relies heavily on the generosity of people across New Zealand to fund its vital work, operating in 20 locations across the country and managing an extensive programme of fundraising, grants, donations and lotteries.

The Challenge:

With a complex funding model, multiple revenue streams, and strict auditing and compliance requirements, the Heart Foundation’s financial operations depend on a stable, efficient, yet agile ERP system.

“We rely heavily on the generosity of people all across New Zealand through our various fundraising and lotteries efforts. With numerous financial layers to manage, including donations, auditing, and compliance, our ERP financial system is instrumental in supporting the smooth operations of our foundation,” says Jacqui Bernard, Finance Manager.

Jacqui joined the Heart Foundation in 2003, at a time when Adaptable Consulting was already supporting several other IT initiatives.

Up until 2020, the foundation operated an on-premise Dynamics SL system, which was widely used by charities at the time.

Like many businesses across New Zealand and beyond, the Covid lockdowns shed a lot of light on many of the limitations organisations faced with older and less agile IT platforms.

“During Covid lockdowns, all staff had to work remotely, which really highlighted a number of challenges for us with some of the manual processes we had in place using our older systems that weren’t cloud-based,” says Jacqui.

With staff spread across 20 locations and remote work becoming the norm, the need for a modern, accessible, cloud-based ERP system became clear.

Introducing Business Central and the next evolution of a trusted partnership

Post Covid, the Heart Foundation started evaluating various cloud-based ERP platforms that could support their financial operation, both in their current state and into the future.

“We opted for Business Central as a cloud-based solution and chose to stick with Adaptable as our implementation partner. They were a known and well-trusted party who fully understood the requirements of our organisation, including the unique compliance responsibilities associated with operating a charity,” Jacqui explains.

Once the decision was made to make the transition, the implementation side of things took around six months from scoping, planning, building, testing, and deployment.

Migrating to Business Central created a modern financial platform that eliminated previous manual processes and improved visibility across the organisation.

“Since moving to Business Central, we have created a significant number of efficiencies across all financial areas of our organisation. Our invoices now automatically upload directly from email, printing requirements have been almost completely removed, and processing cycles are much faster and more accurate,” comments Jacqui.

As a registered charity, the foundation operates seven lottery grants per year, which brings its own unique legislative auditing requirements, as alongside an annual audit, each lottery has its own specific audits as well.

“Inside Business Central, we can now centrally store and access all transactions and correspondence data inside our journal entries. Every invoice, supporting document, and correspondence can be linked and searchable, which has been a massive efficiency gain for us as it acts as a full digital audit trail.”

“The turnaround times between lotteries is often quite tight too, so being able to make this data easily accessible and able to be shared quickly for each audit has been a big win for us,” says Jacqui.

Ongoing support & Service Level Agreement (SLA) partnership

Given the evolving needs of the charity sector, the desire for ongoing support beyond the initial implementation phase was something very important for the Heart Foundation in terms of their partner preference. Subsequently, they also engaged Adaptable Consulting through a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to provide ongoing software upgrades, customisation projects, new staff training and onboarding, day-to-day troubleshooting, and overall strategic guidance as operations evolve.

“The SLA model with Adaptable has been great for us. It gives us peace of mind and full visibility of hours used and remaining. Their ticketing system works smoothly too, and we never have to wait unnecessarily,” Jacqui explains.

A partnership spanning more than 20 years

Some of the greatest strengths of this relationship is its longevity, mutual trust, and compatibility of working styles. As technology systems and even personnel across both entities have changed the strengths of the partnership have remained well intact.

“Over the past 20+ years, we have found Adaptable incredibly helpful to work with. People across both organisations may have changed over time, but we have always felt well supported. They are knowledgeable, approachable, and support is always on hand for myself or my team,” Jacqui explains.

Beyond the platform migration and the efficiency gains, overall the Heart Foundation values most the relationship and continuity Adaptable provides.

“The biggest draw card for us in partnering with Adaptable is definitely the ongoing support. Implementation was great, but what really mattered to us was having a partner who could provide technical support at both a day-to-day and strategic level as the needs of our charity evolve,” Jacqui concludes.

By combining the many advantages of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central system with the strength of the longstanding partnership with Adaptable Consulting, the Heart Foundation now operates on a modern, scalable financial platform that supports a whole range of efficiency gains. And above all, it allows the Heart Foundation to focus more of its energy on what matters most, stopping all people in New Zealand from dying prematurely from heart disease and enabling people with heart disease to live full lives.

Jacqui Bernard
Finance Manager
Heart Foundation