The Near North District School Board in Ontario is responsible for the public education of approximately 10,000 learners from across the geographic regions of the Almaguin Highlands, North Bay and Parry Sound. The School Board serves a wide variety of communities within a 17,020 km2 area in towns and communities from Mattawa to Sturgeon Falls, North Bay to Emsdale and Britt to MacTier. The School Board currently operates 28 elementary schools, 7 secondary/intermediate schools, and two Adult Learning Centres, and offers related programs and services.
The School Board historically used Excel spreadsheets to manage their $158 million budget, but wanted a system designed to streamline their entire budgeting process, which involves more than 20 individual budget contributors, their Provincial reporting requirements (Ontario EFIS Reports), as well as to manage salary and benefits planning involving multiple collective bargaining agreements. Impressed with Questica Budget’s reputation and its ability to administer distributed budgeting, create salary modelling and measure performance, the School Board purchased Questica Budget’s Operating, Salaries, Capital and Performance modules to work with their K212 finance system.
Equipped with Questica’s powerful, multi-user software, the Near North District School Board can move away from disparate spreadsheet-based budgeting (which can be error-prone and labor intensive) and spend more time gaining important insights from the budget. Questica Budget provides the School Board with the ability to prepare the budget, forecasts and analysis, what-if scenarios, standard and custom reports, and staff and benefits planning. Questica Performance will also help set standards and provide an unlimited number of budgetary and non-budgetary KPI (key performance indicators) measures with scorecards. As a result, the School Board will be able to measure and report on educational outcomes and better serve the schools within their District.
