Every not-for-profit and NDIS finance leader knows the feeling: you're not short on effort, you're short on time. Acquittals eat a week you don't have. Cash sits in limbo waiting on a report. A handful of people quietly hold together a process that would fall over if any one of them took a week off.
At a recent Wiise breakfast briefing in Sydney, fractional CFO Adrian Tan (CEO of Outsourced Professional Solutions, a Brisbane-based finance and compliance firm working across the NFP, NDIS and aged care sectors) shared three real client stories that get at the same root cause from three different angles: systems, processes and people, all needing to move together.
Here's what stood out — and what it means if you're sitting on the same problems.
Case study 1: Turning a 3-year government contract from a cash-flow headache into a same-day report
One provider landed a significant three-year funding contract with the Queensland State Government — great news, with a catch. The agreement came with quarterly and annual compliance reporting requirements, and cash didn't move until the acquittal did. Get the report out late, and the funding body simply doesn't pay.
Adrian's team went back to the source: the funding agreement itself, and its five-odd pages of clauses, deadlines and requirements. From there, they set up a dedicated business unit inside Wiise to represent the contract — capturing the funding, direct costs and allocated indirect costs at a granular enough level to produce an accurate acquittal straight out of the system.
The bigger unlock wasn't the software, though — it was training the accounting team to tag every relevant transaction correctly as it happened. Get that step wrong and no report, however well designed, will be right.
The result: a financial acquittal produced directly from Wiise, audit-ready, and delivered on day one of each quarter instead of scraping in by the deadline — maximising cash collection every single quarter.
Case study 2: Replacing a system the business had already outgrown
Adrian describes this one like a pair of shoes that were falling apart at every seam — not because anyone was careless, but because the business had simply outgrown them. A large NDIS provider had been running its finance and payroll through MYOB for years, propped up by a growing pile of manual workarounds and spreadsheets outside the system. It had scaled well past what the platform could support.
Rather than a like-for-like swap, this was a full finance transformation — systems, processes and people, together. Wiise replaced MYOB as the accounting platform, but just as much of the work went into re-engineering the processes underneath it and bringing the finance team along through genuine change management.
The results:
Case study 3: Getting 300 casual timesheets off paper, Excel and phone calls
The third case study is the most relatable to anyone who's ever run payroll manually. This provider had over 300 casual, award-based support workers, with fortnightly timesheets coming in on paper, by fax, or by email. Three to four people would manually key them into Excel, run them through layered macros to generate pay data, then load that into payroll — several days of effort every single pay cycle. And even after all that, workers were still calling in with pay queries.
The fix combined an electronic timesheet system with Wiise's built-in award interpreter (via KeyPay), configured to match the actual award agreement. Timesheets now flow straight into payroll and compute automatically, correctly, every time.
The result: manual payroll effort dropped from several days to about two — mostly just checking and validating — and the team freed up by the change was redeployed into other parts of finance rather than let go.
The common thread
None of these are stories about buying new software. They're stories about three levers — systems, processes and people — and the fact that pulling only one of them rarely fixes the underlying problem. As Adrian put it, of the three, people are consistently the hardest: even a well-designed system falls over without a finance team that understands the business behind the numbers, not just the debits and credits.
If any of these problems sound familiar — cash tied up in acquittals, a system you've clearly outgrown, or a payroll process held together by Excel macros and goodwill — it's worth asking the same question Adrian starts with: is this a systems problem, a process problem, or a people problem? Usually it's some combination, but naming which one matters most is where the fix actually starts.
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