Waipā District Council delivers ratepayer value with SaaS ERP strategy

Waipā District Council in New Zealand recently moved to a cloud-based SaaS platform for financials and contract management. Prior to the change, the council relied heavily on time-consuming, paper-based systems.

“There was no traceability, no integration, and lots of manual handling,” said Richard Henderson, Manager of Information Services. “If a supplier invoice went missing, we were basically checking inboxes to figure out where it was in the payment process.”

The finance team had limited visibility into where invoices were in the approval process, and suppliers — particularly smaller, local businesses — often faced long wait times for payments.

“If one team member sent the invoice, there was no record of it for other people. No one knew where things were at,” said Farrah Templeton, TechnologyOne Finance Systems Lead, Waipā District Council.

Manual controls also made compliance and coding more difficult, while the absence of built-in checks left the organisation open to risk. Although the council had already made improvements by implementing electronic purchase orders, accounts payable being disconnected still created too many inefficiencies and put pressure on the finance team.

Implementing OneCouncil from TechnologyOne established a single source of truth for Waipā Council, with Financials providing real-time visibility of spending, Contracts Management ensuring tighter financial controls, and AP Automations matching 95% of invoices to purchase orders automatically — helping eliminate errors, fraud risk and payment delays.

“Our procurement policy prioritises supporting local tradespeople, so not only are we improving our transparency and auditability, but by ensuring our contractors and suppliers are paid accurately and on time we contribute directly to the local economy,” Henderson said. “We’re not bringing in modern tools just for the sake of it. We’re constantly on the lookout for new innovative and ways of working that allow us to be as efficient as possible so we can make the most of the ratepayer dollar.

“Embracing a single source solution like OneCouncil saves us from managing a range of disparate systems. There is a whole raft of things we don’t have to worry about because integration, performance and security are all taken care of by TechnologyOne and we haven’t added extra layers of complexity by trying to mould the new technology around old processes.”

“Local governments across New Zealand have invested heavily into digitising core systems in recent years but using new technology with old processes won’t deliver return on that investment,” said Ben Malpass, Executive Vice President for Local Government at TechnologyOne. “Waipā District Council demonstrates that complementing new capabilities with new ways of working is key to realising the benefits of innovative technology. We are thrilled to be working with them as they continue to deliver more efficient services and greater value to their community.”

Since implementing the OneCouncil platform, the council has transformed the way it handles procurement, contracts and accounts payable (AP), reducing processing costs by 66% and manual data entry by 1920 hours.