The five benefits of digitalised government finance

Delivering consistent, proactive and secure services is a complex job in the Public Services and Government sector – and that’s before you add an evolving government landscape, changing shape of the workforce and increasing demands from citizens. Government agencies that move to digitalised finance systems, such as Queensland Treasury Corporation, not only weather these disruptions but enjoy these key benefits.

That’s where low-code development tools with out-of-the-box capabilities as well as flexibility to cater for organisations’ specific needs can accelerate your journey to a single source of financial truth.

Digitalisation is the key step in a journey toward simpler, smarter, more stable finance services. Not only do departments gain powerful visibility of their data – spanning from the grand view to the granular – your teams can use it to make faster, better informed, more accurate decisions.

Nathan Nogic, Microsoft’s National Public Sector Lead for Business Applications, explains “The modular nature of Dynamics 365 allows for deployment of specific capability as is needed by finance teams. This reduces time and cost to implement, allowing departments to achieve policy objectives in less time and with less investment. Against an increasing backdrop of budget repair, Dynamics 365 enables departments to deliver capability quickly while prioritising investment into delivering citizen and policy outcomes.”

For business leaders who want to take the next steps – check out this whitepaper; 9 Emerging Trends for the Futurist CFO

1. Make smarter decisions with a single source of truth

Traditional government finance platforms have often become complex over time and face end of life. This makes it difficult to accurately manage risk, deliver accountability and make informed decisions.

Digitalisation of financial systems and processes is the key to simpler, smarter, more stable finance. Consolidating the full power of your data with cloud technologies, like Dynamics 365 Finance, gives you a single source of truth. Not only does this provide your organisation powerful data visibility – spanning from the grand view to the granular – but your team can use it to make faster, better informed, more accurate decisions.

Queensland Treasury Corporation (QTC), transitioned to Dynamics 365 Finance in 2021 and has been able to modernise processes, according to Michelle McMullen, QTC’s CFO and Managing Director, Finance Technology and Data and her team at QTC. The change has allowed their agency to “modernise processes, become data-centric and derive greater level of insights, and harness efficient processing and automation, which all contribute to better value for our clients and stakeholders”.

2. Achieve accountability with timely access to data

Accountability is a KPI of every government organisation. To achieve this, timely access to accurate data is essential. To streamline these processes, Dynamics 365 helps develop a much-needed audit trail for compliance, ensuring transparency in delivery of services. This type of integrated approach requires robust digital and regulatory infrastructure. With a stable core platform, government department can get the basics right.

“Rolling out Dynamics 365 for Finance has improved month end close and reporting timeframes, provided almost real-time data for analytics, better equips the QTC finance team to answer queries, and provides mobile access to the platform for people on the move.” according to McMullen.

Developing an advanced finance system like this requires an integrated approach, complete with robust digital and regulatory infrastructure. But with a stable core platform, you can be sure you’re getting the basics right – along with the ability to add advanced technologies on a modular basis. Moving to an integrated approach also allows for the removal of shadow IT and accounting, while embracing new opportunities for rapid solution development.

3. Attract talent and delight customers with simplified systems

As the war for talent heats up, it’s never been more important to attract and retain high performing finance people. Today’s finance teams expect modern, easy to use digital systems that they can access remotely at any time. They want to use data, not enter it.

“People have more time to do interesting work,” McMullen explains, adding that it has driven employee engagement and innovation. For example, QTC previously handled monthly reconciliations with Excel, but now it’s done automatically using Power BI.

Another benefit of digitalising to a core platform like Dynamics 365 is the way it smoothly integrates with Teams, Outlook and other Microsoft office productivity tools. You don’t need to bolt-on or customise anything – your team can rely on familiar office software integrated with finance data, analytics and decision-making tools. This creates opportunities to automate and streamline processes, remove double handling and duplication of effort, enhance productivity, simplify reporting and essentially do much more in less time.

Government organisations are also responsible to citizens, who also expect convenient, accessible digital and mobile services. There are a myriad of ways to achieve this. But rather than searching for multiple best-of-breed systems which you need to integrate and maintain for yourself, consolidating to key vendors who offer integrated platforms gives you a single view of data and support for innovation.

4. Unleash efficiencies with access to automation

Once your organisation is firmly in the world of digitalised finance, you can step things up a notch with powerful built-in analytics to respond to accountability and transparency expectations. When applied over data, analytics can serve up the insights you need to build efficiencies, spot opportunities, uncover trends and hone new ways of working. With a digitalised finance system like Dynamics 365, simply look at your data ecosystem and decide what you want to measure.

Changing to Dynamics 365 shows how digitalised finance is game-changing for staff, allowing them to be more productive and innovative at work. “The richer collection of data also positions QTC to expand its capability – instead of always producing reports that reveal what has happened, it can now play a more forward-looking role,” says McMullen.

A digitalised finance system also gives you the right foundations to incorporate emerging technologies at any point in the future. This will allow finance teams to take advantage of automation and real time processing to drive efficiencies. Powerful analytics tools like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can also be unlocked to allow employees to identify opportunities and uncover trends more easily than traditional systems to drive better decision making outcomes.  Power BI help to provide the insights you need to build efficiencies, spot opportunities and uncover trends.

5. Benefit from secure inter-agency collaboration

The pandemic proved that government agencies can be agile – and they gain a lot from a holistic approach to inter-agency collaboration, resource-sharing and knowledge exchange. Now the challenge for government is to continue the rapid rate of digitisation and benefit realisation. Looking to the future, it’s not so much a question of enabling collaboration as much as properly securing it, particularly when it comes to finance systems.

The QTC team highlighted that the deliberate decision by the organisation to leverage Microsoft public cloud and other technologies opens the door to a broad array of trusted and secure services.

A digitalised finance system like Dynamics 365 has fully interoperable modules and dashboards, which means staff can safely and securely share information between departments and agencies. Whether you upgrade all your systems at once or introduce Dynamics 365 in a modular fashion, it’s continually secured and maintained to keep sensitive information safe from improper use.

For Govt CFOs who want to keep across the current trends, I recommend reading 9 Emerging Trends for the Futurist CFO.