What’s Happening in the Finance Department

New Enterprise Resource Planning Software

Over the last few months, the Finance, Human Resources, and Information Technology departments have been reviewing and assessing the tender responses for new district wide Enterprise Resource Planning software. After careful consideration, the contract was awarded to Sparkrock, a Microsoft partner. Sparkrock was started in 2003 and supports hundreds of thousands of users across North America in the K-12 Education, Non-Profit, Human Services and Public Sectors. The product we will be implementing is called Sparkrock 365, a cloud-based application of Microsoft 365.

While the primary users of Sparkrock 365 will be the Accounting, Payroll, Purchasing and Human Resources departments, this change will impact almost every employee in the district. We will continue to provide electronic processes such as timesheet entry, purchase requisitions, employee expense claims and dashboard reporting, but these processes will look different. Because this is such a significant change, we are carefully planning the implementation process. Opportunities for training, both in-person and through a video library, will be provided.

We will develop the implementation timeline in the upcoming months; however, we expect implementation to take over a year. We recognize that this change is significant but moving to Sparkrock 365 ensures that the system we rely on is secure and will enable us to provide reliable service for many years to come. And we are embracing this as an opportunity to rejuvenate our processes and (hopefully) simplify some of the tasks that take you away from your important work.

Year End

As we are approaching the end of another school and fiscal year, there are quite a few deadlines approaching as well. We will be communicating these school and departmental deadlines by email in the next few weeks. We greatly appreciate your work to meet these deadlines, as our annual audit takes place over the summer months when many of you are not in the office. We have been told that the Office of the Auditor General will be performing our audit in 2025 and it is important that we demonstrate strong internal processes.  As always, if you have any questions or concerns about the information we are requesting, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We hope you enjoy the last few months of the 2022/23 school year and look forward to new opportunities is 2023/24!

MONICA SCHULTE, ASSISTANT SECRETARY-TREASURER
Finance