Questica is proud to be celebrating 20 years in business!
We were officially founded way back in October 1998, in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. We are very proud of how far we have come in 20 years.
To mark this special milestone, we’ve put together a list of 20 fun facts about Questica, our staff and our customers.
1. We are 100% public sector and non-profit focused with almost 700 government, education, healthcare and non-profit customers in 46 states, 10 provinces and territories, plus a handful of international locations.
2. We have 80 staff members at Questica. A number work virtually across North America, with the majority of staff working at our two offices in Burlington, Ontario, Canada and Huntington Beach, California, U.S.
3. Over $63 billion in annual budgets are managed through our budgeting and transparency solutions. Our customers’ annual budgets range from $5 million to over $4 billion.
4. The first module we built collaboratively with the City of Burlington, ON was for capital budgeting and was called IFAB – Internet Forecasting and Budgeting – before we changed it to CFAB or Capital Forecasting and Budgeting.
5. In 2006, when we introduced our operating module, we changed the name to Team Budget, which we used for a few years before settling on Questica Budget. Today, the Questica Budget Suite has three core modules – operating, salaries and position planning, capital – along with performance measures and financial statements.
6. Our first Questica Budget customer was the City of Burlington, Ontario, but how about our other solutions? Our first OpenBook customer was the City of Largo, Florida, and our first Budget Book customer was Washington County, Oregon.
7. While we’ve been growing our staff complement over the past few years (including integrating our PowerPlan colleagues in Huntington Beach, CA) we have 16 colleagues who have worked for Questica (or PowerPlan) for over 10 years, nine colleagues between 5 and 10 years and 53 colleagues for under 5 years.
8. With over 30% of our staff being developers we clock over 41,000 development hours last year in enhancing our solutions for customers.
9. We have over 100 public sector customers who have been with us for five or more years. In 2017, Questica acquired PowerPlan Corporation, which included our Huntington Beach location and colleagues, as well as over 400 non-profit and public sector customers.
10. Which customer was our shortest Questica Budget sale and implementation? That would be the Sitka Community Hospital in Alaska where Questica closed the sale and helped Sitka go live within two weeks!
11. The most remote customer location Questica staff have visited? It’s a tie between the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada.
12. The most new features of any Questica Budget release? That would be our small feature release (2018.2) which had over 60 features. But from sheer size and complexity, our new Advanced Calculation Engine – ACE – which officially launches this January 2019 took over seven months to develop.
13. In 2016, we held our first Questica user conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that brought together 70 customer attendees. This year 107 customers attended our five events in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada; Anaheim, California; Tampa, Florida; Denver, Colorado; and Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We have three events planned in 2019.
14. How many U.S. Presidents or Canadian Prime Ministers have been in office since Questica was founded in 1998? The answer is four U.S. Presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In Canada, four Prime Ministers: Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.
15. Our Questica Budget customers collectively ran reports 577,000 times in their last 12-month budget cycle, these included:
- 243,000 out-of-the-box reports
- 232,000 custom repots built by Questica’s Professional Services
- 91,000 self-serve reports that our users made for themselves
- 11,000 Ad hoc Views.
If printed and placed end-to-end, these reports would stretch 161 km (or 100 miles), or the equivalent of 291 stacked CN Towers.
16. The partner with the most joint customers? It’s Central Square Technologies (formerly Aptean) with over 80 customers using both Questica Budget and one of their ERP systems.
17. The total number of implementation hours for our customers last year, broken down by public sector vertical:
- Government – 5,200 hours
- Higher Education – 4,000 hours
- K-12 Schools – 3,450 hours
- Healthcare – 6,020 hours
- Non-profit – 1,610 hours (Questica’s PowerPlan budgeting solution)
18. Questica delivered just over 1,000 hours of training last year to our customers. Our average for training hours per customer has actually shorted due to the expansion of our online Questica Help and Academy video and training resources.
19. While we have over 375 non-profit customers with diverse missions ranging from children’s charities, zoos and other animal groups, community groups, religious organizations, associations and more, we do have quite a number of food banks and museums from across the continent including:
- Central Texas Food Bank, Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, Feeding San Diego, Food Bank of Northern Nevada, Foodbank Northern Illinois, Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, OH, Harvesters Community Food Network in Kansas City, MI, Idaho Foodbank Warehouse, Maryland Food Bank, Mid-Ohio Foodbank, San Antonio Food Bank, Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara, Second Harvest Foodbank Mid-Tennessee, and the St. Louis Area Food Bank.
- Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, Autry Museum of the American West, CA, Boston Children’s Museum, Children’s Museum of Houston, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR, Dallas Museum of Art, Honolulu Museum of Art, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MA, McNay Art Museum, TX, Milwaukee Art Museum, Missouri History Museum, Salvador Dali Museum, FL, San Diego Society of Natural History Museum, National WWII Museum, LA, Saint Louis Art Museum, Vero Beach Museum of Art, FL, and the Walters Art Museum, MD.
20. Which customer has the least conventional name? How about Municipal District of Opportunity #17 in Alberta? It is home to over 5,400 people, including some 2,000 residents of the Bigstone Cree Nation Reserves. How about our happiest customer? It is Operation Smile has helped provide life-saving reconstructive cleft surgeries to thousands of children and young adults in over 60 countries.
While Questica excited to look back at 20 great years, we are also looking forward to the next 20 years and beyond. From our first budgeting module designed for public sector capital budgets to our current suite of Questica budgeting, performance, transparency, reporting and engagement solutions, our goal was and still is about making public sector finance better for everyone.
Our team prides itself on the long-term relationships that we have developed. Our customers are absolutely what keeps us coming to work each and every day, so thank you for choosing to work with us!
