Bursar Email 07 March 2023
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to tell you we have made the first steps to replace our 1990’s finance system by launching the FinPOST (Finance Programme for Operations and Service Transformation) finance transformation project and wanted to share a first insight into the plans with you.
We want to take advantage of technological advances to deliver a high-quality financial services experience for our students, staff and external stakeholders.
To achieve this, we will be working with people, internally and externally, who use and provide finance-related services and will work with the UCD community to identify, shape and support the changes we need.
- deliver a high-quality user experience to make our jobs more enjoyable
- improve our processes and ways of working to enable us to get work completed more quickly and more easily and
- use new and emerging financial technology so that we can focus on value-added services.
Over the next 6 months or so we will work with the UCD community to define our requirements and go to market to procure a top-tier finance system. We will then be in a position to put in place a detailed implementation plan.
Examples of the areas where we aim to achieve improvements are:
- Procure to Pay- eProcurement, Online Expenses, Payments to Third Parties
- Projects- Research Projects Planning, Reporting and Budgetary Spend Control, Capital Projects Control & Accounting
- Financial Planning & Reporting- Budgets, Forecasts, Censuses, Dashboards, Analytics, Operational and Internal Management Reporting
- Order to Cash- Streamlining Income Processing, Customer Debtors Ledger and Debt Management and
- Record to Report- Accounting, External Reporting, Tax Returns, Balance Sheet Control
I will sponsor the programme and Eamonn O’Neill will lead the programme. While we are starting with a small team from the Finance Office, lots of people will be involved over the duration of the programme.
We want to connect with the UCD community from the start. This means that, in the coming weeks, we would like to hear more about your experience with finance to better understand your tasks and interactions with finance, what works well, what needs to change and how your day-to-day work with finance can be improved.
We will hold workshops with groups of people to listen to and capture their views and will also enable you to provide additional input via a survey. We hope to have about 200 staff actively involved in these workshops – which will represent the variety and complexity of our user experiences and wishes.
The Staff e-zine will be our regular comms channel to provide you with updates and news from FinPOST. We will also launch the UCD FinPOST website which will introduce the Programme, our team members and latest news and developments. So, do look out for the launch of the website in the e-zine later this month.
If you would like to get in touch with the FinPOST team then please contact us at(opens in a new window)finpost@ucd.ieand we can set up a chat.
Thanks,
David