Karel de Grote-Hogeschool
University Reduces Administrative Overhead, Teaches Valuable Business Practices
With six universities in Antwerp, Belgium, Karel de Grote-Hogeschool needed a solid financial management solution to track purchasing, receivables, fixed assets, and other business operations. Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV has helped it gain better control over its financial record-keeping, while reducing administrative overhead at the same time. Additionally, Karel de Grote-Hogeschoolis using Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the classroom to teach aspiring accountants and business majors the skills they will need to account for and run their own businesses after graduation.
Situation
Karel de Grote-Hogeschool is a consortium of six universities in Antwerp, Belgium, with approximately 8,100 students. Primary areas of study include art and design, healthcare, commercial sciences and business administration, industrial sciences and technology (engineering), teacher education, and applied social studies. It offers both graduate and postgraduate studies, with special training programs for industries and non-profit organizations. With 1,000 employees, the University’s mission is to deliver a high-quality educational experience and to help its students prepare for their futures.
Prior to the year 2000, Karel de Grote-Hogeschool was using a mixture of manual and non-integrated computerized processes to manage its business affairs. Typical frustrations experienced by the staff included the extensive amount of time it took to work with paper-based processes for purchasing and receivables, the need to constantly re-record similar information across multiple systems, a labor-intensive reporting process, and the difficulty of tracking down information already entered.
Several years earlier and on an entirely separate track, the educators in the accounting and business management fields were making plans to transition from their textbook/workbook methods of teaching accounting to their students. Some of the computerized solutions they considered were too expensive, and in general they didn’t feel a strong reason to choose one system over another. They were looking for a computer-based system that would give students a real-life understanding of the proper accounting methods and procedures they would be employing in their jobs after graduation. In a perfect scenario, students would be learning on the same systems used by their future potential employers. Having hands-on experience with the actual software and systems used in area businesses would give students an automatic advantage in qualifying for and landing a job after graduation.
Solution
To help students learn proper computerized accounting and business management practices, the Education Department selected Navision, now known as Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV business software, as the foundation for its coursework. Educators found Microsoft Dynamics NAV to be a solid solution that represents all the primary aspects of accounting and business management. They worked with their partner, to develop the coursework that would help students fully understand and appreciate the accepted accounting practices, while also getting their first taste of the types of computer programs they would face when entering the work world.
The Finance Department, after developing its own criteria for a financial management solution that would help it manage the business operations for the University, also selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The University uses Microsoft Dynamics NAV to manage invoicing and receivables, purchasing and payables, and financial reporting and budgeting.
As is often the case in large institutions with diverse departmental goals and reporting hierarchies, neither the Education Department nor the Finance Department knew that the other group had chosen Microsoft Dynamics NAV. It was simply a case of different departments, with very different needs, both choosing Microsoft Dynamics NAV as their solution.
Benefits
Since implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the classroom, Karel de Grote-Hogeschool has educated thousands of students on the proper accounting and business management procedures used in business today. The Accounting and Finance Department has been able to streamline receivables and payables business processes, helping it better track the financial information for the University while reducing the administrative overhead required to perform these duties.
Increased Learning in the Classroom
Each year more than 300 students study financial and business management courses at Karel de Grote-Hogeschool, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides the framework in which these students can further develop their skills and understanding of proper business management practices.
Two courses use Microsoft Dynamics NAV as their foundation: financials and logistics. In the first year, financial management students begin by building a “portfolio” company to learn the principles of bookkeeping and to see how all aspects of a company come together in the financial management system. Using Microsoft Dynamics NAV, students get a practical understanding of the subledgers and ledgers used to account for the everyday business of a company, including payables, receivables, taxes, and fixed assets. Second-year students continue to build more complex aspects of their portfolio company and are also expected to learn to customize the business management solution, to add fields for tracking business-specific information, or to streamline data-entry operations for specific tasks. Microsoft Dynamics NAV has a well-documented process for modifying data entry windows, adding fields, and customizing reports, supporting the University’s ability to give its students hands-on training in this important area.
Students studying logistics also use Microsoft Dynamics NAV to help them gain a real-world appreciation for the processes involved in supply chain management. Areas of focus include warehouse management, stock analysis, and purchasing. By mirroring a real company’s business activities, logistics students can gain a practical understanding of concepts such as time-to-order, time-to-stock, in-transit inventory, back orders, partial fulfillments, multi-warehouse and multi-bin stocking, economic order quantities, inventory valuation, pick/pack/ship processes, transfers, depreciation, and more. Lesson by lesson, all students build their portfolio company. At the end of the year, they have a map of all the transactions affecting the company’s inventory, which they can use when interviewing with prospective employers to show their understanding of these concepts and processes.
In addition to the primary focuses on finance and logistics, students also use Microsoft Dynamics NAV to generate and analyze business reports. Having the ability to draw business information from the system helps to clarify why the information must be captured in the first place and strengthens the students’ understanding of the important role financial and logistical management plays in business.
More Effective Finance Management
Microsoft Dynamics NAV is helping Karel de Grote-Hogeschool more effectively manage its finances by automating and streamlining many of the routines users perform every day.
On the receivables side, cash receipts and banking has become significantly more efficient with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The University has the ability to manage all standard banking transactions electronically; recording cash receipts from students for tuition, books, and other incidentals, and then transferring a file containing those transactions directly to its bank at the end of the day. “Managing bank transactions manually took a lot of work—usually two to three hours per day,” said Jessica Roef, a bookkeeper in the Finance Department. “Now we can print all the information from our banks each day. Within a half hour all the banks are booked.” Electronic banking with Microsoft Dynamics NAV is saving the University approximately two to three full days of data entry per week, substantially reducing administrative overhead for this important process.
Bank reconciliation is also expedited with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Previously, accounting staff had to manually review and reconcile checking account statements against payables and cash receipts entered in the check registers, a time-consuming and tedious process. And because the bank statements were received monthly (often with several days lag time between the statement end date and the date the statement was received), the University never really had an accurate, up-to-date reconciliation of its many bank accounts. Today, using Microsoft Dynamics NAV, all accounts are reconciled on a daily basis, and it takes approximately a half hour per day to review and reconcile bank transactions and update the financial management system.
Payment to suppliers has also become much more streamlined with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Karel de Grote-Hogeschool processes upwards of 15,000 vendor payments per year. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the payables administrators are able to pay vendors electronically, saving a tremendous amount of manual processing time, as well as the printing and postage normally associated with paper checks. The University also can be sure that vendor payments are processed on-time, allowing it to take full advantage of term-based discounts and to avoid late payments.
Ease of Use
While the University was primarily motivated by the ability of Microsoft Dynamics NAV to help it streamline business processes, the staff has discovered the value of having a system that is both easy to learn and use, as well as a system that enables them to easily share data with other Microsoft® Office programs, such as Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software and Microsoft Office Word. “The Microsoft interface is something all our employees are already familiar with, so it was very quick for them to learn Microsoft Dynamics,” said Katrijn De Troeyer, who teaches logistics at the University.
The ability to import and export data to and from Microsoft Office Excel has proven to be an invaluable capability for the University. It routinely uses Office Excel to analyze cash positions, depreciations, and investments, and can easily export information from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Excel to analyze current information. Budgeting is also primarily managed in Office Excel, and University personnel appreciate the ability to export financial data to Excel, which can be shared with department heads and other personnel. Once budgets have been set, the information can be imported back into Microsoft Dynamics NAV and included on financial reports showing budget-to-actuals performance by month and by department. “Because it’s Windows-based, it’s easy to manipulate,” said De Troeyer. “For example, we can import our cash register, and also our depreciations for our investments, every month.”
The majority of funding for Karel de Grote-Hogeschool comes from the Belgian government, so it’s important that it has accurate financial figures to justify expenses and be able to state its case when increases in funding are needed. By implementing an integrated Microsoft Dynamics NAV financial management system, the University can more easily bring together all the data needed to show how funds are being spent and to justify requests for additional funds when necessary.