By Tim Manery, Financial Oversight Committee Member (tim.manery@skipatrol.ca)
To meet the reporting needs of our auditors and the Canada Revenue Agency the CSP is required to report all of its financial information from coast to coast. Historically, this reporting took multiple paid people more than a week to compile from 100 Excel spreadsheets emailed to head office.
There had to be a better, cheaper, more accurate way to do this, so back in 2012 Tim Manery, Charlie Turner and Pierre Charest developed something that did not exist yet for the CSP. No, not red jackets, but an online financial reporting system for the whole system with consultation across the country to understand everyone’s individual needs and requirements. This new system allowed the annual financial data to be reported by numerous individuals including financial representatives at the division, zone and patrol levels in addition to the national office. It was built into the NDS and leveraged the NDS’ existing security and user database. Over the years it was developed and expanded by the CSP Financial Oversight Committee lead by Pam FitzGerald.
With the retirement of the NDS, so were its financial reporting capabilities. The CSP Financial Oversight Committee was tasked with replacing the decade-old system. This would require a system segregated from Yeti to collect and maintain this data. So again in 2022, Tim Manery was asked to head up the project and complete the research, planning, and execution of implementing a new financial reporting application for the financial year end March 31, 2023.
Tim realized this was no small undertaking and built a committee of people with the required skill sets to meet these extremely tough deadlines. That committee grew to include Steve Reeves, Angel Vera and Peter Weiler, and reported to the CSP Financial Oversight Committee (chaired by Pam FitzGerald) and the board of directors.
It was quickly decided that the old NDS reporting system was so uniquely developed for the CSP that the committee had to recreate that system but in a more modern environment.
The team not only had to develop the application from scratch, migrate 10 years of data, test functionality and implement the application with all new features and structure, but have it live by the end of May 2023. And now it was February 2023.
Ski patrollers are awesome, but the committee needed some serious horsepower to meet the deadline, and in February a professional programmer was hired. Work started immediately at developing this new modern tool.
The key functions the application had to meet consumed several pages, but included:
- Transferring existing data from the NDS to the new application to secure the historical financial data.
- Allowing division and zone presidents to manage their teams to enter data during the current and future financial periods while maintaining security.
- Enable users to securely log into the system to enter and edit financial data for each fiscal period.
- Provide ability to review data prior to final close, and to print current and past financial reports.
- Have the capability to send emails to users of the system to notify them of deadlines, changes in security, financial data status and assigned locations.
- Allow administrators to run reports to facilitate government reports and analytics.
- The application had to be bilingual.
There were so many Teams meetings I am sure Microsoft had to upgrade its servers. The next 3.5 months was a mad rush to achieve what seemed impossible. As the software developers developed each stage of the application, the team tested each function and provided feedback on financial guidelines, user interface functionality and bugs encountered.
When the application was nearing completion, the team did extensive testing to verify the functions and logic of the application using a predefined test deck of data. The team then tested all aspects of the system to determine if we could “break” the system from a user perspective. A ticketing system was integrated so users could report any issues or errors found during their interface with the application.
Instructional videos were created in English and French to guide users through common activities. Access to these videos, and help related documents are accessible directly through the application.
The CSP financial reporting application was rolled out to users on June 12 and is currently in use for the March 31, 2023, financial year end.
This truly was a national project in scope, depth, and people. The committee had to tap on many different people and levels of the CSP to complete the project:
- Constant consultations with Pam FitzGerald.
- French translations of all program screens, automated emails, help text, help videos and more by Jacque Blais.
- Pierre Charest and Charlie Turner helped in migrating data from the NDS to the new app and interpretation of 10 years of data.
- Greg McCormick helped integrate the new financial app under the CSP email and domain name structure.
- Kerri Loudoun assisted in getting the mass emails out to the division and zone presidents to introduce everyone to the launch of the financial reporting application.
And there was zero chance of getting this project completed without the absolute support of Mark Brown, Jean Rioux and the whole board of directors. The CSP, when committed as a whole, can not only ski mountains but move mountains to get projects done!