JDRF automates finance tasks

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) has integrated automated systems into its accounting process, leading to three days’ worth of manual finance tasks automated monthly. 

The global research organisation funds the study and applied medical investigation into a cure for type 1 diabetes.

JDRF’s work follows as it found 42 percent of Australian employees are often stressed, 40 percent are overwhelmed and 39 percent are burnout. 

The research organisation worked with Workato to install automation processes in its back-office functions like finance, IT and HR.

Under the new workflow JDRF can now also to real-time financial information allowing faster generation of month-end management accounts.

David Mutthumani, JDRF's head of finance told Digital Nation the new platform enables the organisation to “reconcile daily revenue by automating and integrating this end-to-end process”.

“The charity sector is always under pressure to deliver on its mission with limited resources. Achieving efficiency through automation was an obvious answer for the finance team to save costs and meet donors’ expectations,” Mutthumani said.

“Instead of duplicating each donor transaction that hits Salesforce into Xero,” its was decided “that JDRF needed a more nuanced solution that other platforms could not handle.”

“Specifically, JDRF needed transactions to be summarised by day and the payment source pushed to XERO as a revenue invoice with line items representing the various campaign codes.

“If JDRF gets a hundred credit card donations on their website in a day, they would see just one invoice in XERO the following day, for the total, which can be reconciled against the bank immediately,” Mutthumani said.

Mutthumani said “JDRF relied on their Salesforce implementation partner, Noble CX, to recommend appropriate tools for their needs and Noble CX introduced them to Workato.’

“Both JDRF and Noble CX collaborated to build the first automated workflow, known as a ‘recipe’”.

Mutthumani added the platform implementation “process began with an initial discovery phase where their technical experts directly engaged us to understand our current processes and biggest challenges.”

“This set the groundwork for a deeper technical exploration. Their approach was iterative and responsive, with a strong emphasis on understanding and addressing our unique challenges.

“Together, we identified that every month end, JDRF’s finance team is under undue pressure to reconcile a whole month’s worth of transactions in a short time.

Mutthumani explained the team was “burdened with highly manual legacy processes such as downloading CSV files from one system and manipulating them for import into another system.”

Under the old system, there was a lot of on one key person while “others in the organisation did not have visibility into what was going on.”

Mutthumani added before the changes the financial statements “could not be produced on a timely basis” partly because data was not available in real-time.