Replacing Great Plains What Nonprofits Need to Know First-20260310_170016UTC-Meeting Recording

March 10, 2026, 5:00PM

1h 0m 22s

Bri-anna Ramsden 0:04

Hello everyone. Welcome to our latest webinar, Replacing Great Plains What Nonprofits Need to Know First.

St.

Quickly going over the agenda today, we are going to do a quick introduction and polls. Then we're going to talk about a bit about how Great Plains is coming to a close and what nonprofits need to consider some of the big myths and questions that we're hearing from nonprofits.

And in the end, we're going to have a mini demo of some data security and AI features. So a little bit of housekeeping. We're going to ask everyone to keep their mics off when they're not talking, just so we don't hear any extra background noises.

If you have any questions throughout the session, feel free to put them in the chat or the Q&A. We are going to be monitoring them and we will have time for Q&A at the end and you will receive a recording of this webinar within five business days.

So here's the team. Gary, I'll pass it off to you.

Gary Servius 1:07

Hello everyone, my name is Gary. I am an account executive at Sparkrock. I've been working in this space for about 15 years now and I'm really excited about today's conversation and hopefully I'll get to chat with some of you after the webinar.

Bri-anna Ramsden 1:26

And we also have Kinley here.

Kinley Graham 1:30

Hi, my name is Kinley Graham. I've been with Sparkrock for 10 1/2 years. I was a customer for five years before that. I've worked in most of the departments of the company and I'm currently the Director of Precess.

Bri-anna Ramsden 1:46

And Wendy will be leading our demo today.

Wendy Brown 1:49

Yes, good afternoon everyone. I'm a pre-sales consultant at Spark Rock, Wendy Brown. I've been working with organizations like yours since 1997, so helping non-profits and and and school boards move from paper-based process.

To digital exeriences and workflows. OI look forward to giving you a little demo today.

Bri-anna Ramsden 2:15

And I'm Bree Ramsden. I'm the marketing manager. I've spent 15 years working with nonprofits, and I will be your moderator today. Before we get started, I have a quick poll for you guys. With Great Plains coming to an end, we want to see what's concerning you about moving off Great Plains. What are you thinking?

Implementation how you're going to do reporting and budgeting. Are you worried about AI or just your internal capacity and how you can get support?

You can select more than one cause I know it's not always just one thing you're worried about.

OK.

OK.

Lots of good responses here. It looks like it's starting to even out a bit, but cost and licensing seems like a big one. Data and security as well as internal capacity and support.

Now I'm going to pass it over to Gary and he can start the show.

Kinley Graham 3:41

M.

Gary Servius 3:41

Thank you, Brie. All right. So as you all know, right, GP is Rinchik end of life and thousands and thousands of organization will have to upgrade to a new solution, right. And in order to help with the conversation, we started a webinar series to provide guidance on how to plan ahead.

How to get ready, what to look for in order to lead the path to a successful migration. And before we get into today's topic, right, I just want to do a recap of what we discussed during the last webinar. So last time we focused on the importance of planning your migration ahead, right? Because even though.

GP end of life seems to be far right. The longer you stay on GP, the more risk you create for your organization. So there were two risks that we talk about. Number one, you have less time that you think #2 grid planes is becoming a security and compliance liability and #3.

Generic ERP can't meet nonprofit requirements.

So last time we started by reviewing end of life timeline to fully understand what we got.

No longer provide any technical support, there are still a few events that will happen before that date, so I would really encourage you to take a look to the timeline and go through it. But even though the official end of life is 2029, there are a few things to consider that will deeply impact how you should look at this timeline.

And why is our an implementation rush that will start as soon as next year in 2027.

And why you actually have less time than you think?

So First off, GP transition requires several step, right? Unfortunately, I see this almost every day, right? It's very common for organization to underestimate what it actually takes.

Going from evaluating your different solution available to contracting with a new vendor and then migrating to a new platform, right?

Takes at least at the very minimum 12 months, and this is really the very minimum. You also have to think about the fact that expertise around GP is going to shrink. Those experts have already shifted most of their business to focus on modern solution like Microsoft Business Central.

So that expertise is really literally shrinking by the day. Adding to that thousands and thousands of GP customer asking for help at the same time, we already know that there will be way more demand that partner capacity.

There are about 30,000 organisation that would be that will start still using GP today, right? And 57% of those organisation have announced that they will not migrate before the end of life, right? Which is a lot of pressure and risk to put on the organisation.

But it also mean that 13,000 will be migrating before the end of life date and knowing that the average ERP migration takes up to 12 months from the evaluation to the go live, this would result in a huge capacity overload.

The second challenge we talk about was security and as GPU reach end of life, compliance is going to become extremely risky, right? So let's say that you become more of a target for bad people, let's say, right? And just like we've seen with.

Windows, right? If you remember with Windows 10, there was that huge push to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 to stay compliant, to stay safe, right? And as we're getting closer and closer to the deadline, some people are actually going to look for this as an opportunity for cyber attack, right? And this here is no different.

Once there is no more security update available, is going to be a liability for all the organization that are still on the solution. So they are going to be in a hurry to move, right? So the longer you stay on the platform, the more exposed you will become in the future or moving forward.

And lastly, the last challenge that we talk about was the fact that generic ERP can't meet the needs of non-profits. So this challenge is often overlooked by organisation coming from very adequate solution, right? And because they've been using that solution for.

1520 years, right? And because they use it for so long, they may not even be aware or you may not even be aware of what is available in the market. So the first thing you absolutely need to know, if you don't know it already, is that the vast majority.

Of the solutions available out there, including the big names, right, our generic ERP solution that were specifically built for businesses, right? And even Microsoft Dynamic Business Central, which is designed to be GP successor, right? And that is the logical and natural upgrade path from GP is actually not that.

Straightforward for non-profit and I insist for non-profit specifically, right? Because Business Central tool, even though very robust and very well designed, was only designed specifically for businesses.

And when you think about the non-profit, right, unlike businesses, they are focused on the expenses, the money going out of the organization, right? It's all about how you spend that money, making sure that every cent is properly accounted for, especially since you must report back to your founders, right?

And because those generic ERP solution are not suitable for nonprofit workflow, they require a lot of customization, a lot of work around manual processes end up being extremely expensive. And when I say expensive, it's just not in term of dollar value.

But also in term of time, effort and resources, right?

So what is the path for nonprofit?

So a little bit later today we'll see how Microsoft still actually provides this upgrade path for nonprofit through solution like Spark Rock and why GP reaching end of flight should actually be seen as an opportunity to modernize your ERP system to a solution that really works for you.

And finally, during the last webinar, we also had the opportunity to go through what your 12 month.

If you have not seen it trade.

Italy give you or guide you through a month by month through the entire process.

Can you guys hear me OK?

Kinley Graham 11:23

Yeah, we can hear you now. Just start at the beginning of this one.

Gary Servius 11:29

OK.

So.

We really encourage everyone to actually take the time to look at the previous webinar, right, because it's going to be very useful. So what we did in that was that we really got you through month by month to the entire process.

The assessments of your current system and workflow, the definition of the vendor requirement, the evaluation and selection of vendor, the implementation kick off right went to everything all the way to the go live, the system set up, the data migration, the configuration, the training, the testing and so on.

What to expect, what to look for, what you should be worried about, how much time and resources do you need, and so forth, right? So I really recommend you to take the time to watch this from that first webinar we received a tons.

Of questions, and this is how we realized that there were a lot of myth and misconception out there when it comes to the GP migration. And today's webinar is going to address most of the common myth and misconception that we heard from you.

And we're going to go through the myth. So keep in mind that we're going to address those through the perspective of of Microsoft, right. Other solution out there will be different. I may not address those, right. So basically bear that in mind as we're going through.

So now I'm going to hand it over to Kinley to tackle the 1st 2 myth.

Kinley Graham 13:01

All right, let's hope that my Internet works a little better than Gary's there. But if you guys can't hear me, just just let me know and we'll we'll continue on. So the very first myth that we heard a lot from a lot of people that attended the last webinar was to do with the security that exists in cloud ERPS.

We all hear lots of different stories, lots of things going on in the cloud space and hosted space, different things like that. The beauty of the Business Central platform online is that Microsoft houses this infrastructure for everyone, basically.

They spend billions every year on security, so the security of the environment is absolutely incredible. There is no back end database access for anyone and there's none of that risk. So the actual database is super secure, tons spent on security, then you add to that.

The authentication and the user security that exists on the platform. It integrates directly with Entra platform and your security groups and permissions actually come down from Entra. This allows you to have much more granular security. In the Sparkrock solution, we have additional security for end users that we call my Sparkrock users.

And Wendy will touch on that a bit later. Now, the other beauty here is that inside Business Central, every entry that is posted to the system cannot be removed. It's posted, it stays, it is tagged with the date and time and the user that posted it. All approvals stay in the system. All that information is always there. Auditors love it because it's transparent, it's clear, it's all.

There, if you make a mistake, you can definitely reverse it, but it doesn't go away. On Prem doesn't usually mean secure because on Prem you're having to manage all the updates, not just of the platform itself. You're also trying to deal with the infrastructure security updates and all of those things.

When you move to a platform like Business Central, those updates are automatic. We have weekly maintenance updates, we have regular monthly minor release updates, and we have two large releases every year that coincide with Microsoft's releases.

So it's very, very secure and gives you the granular security that you need. There's lots of other security features we're happy to talk about and we'll probably have some of those in an upcoming webinar. The next one is data residency and control. This comes up a lot.

Canadian customers very much like to keep their data in Canada. American customers very much love to keep their data in America. So by going to a platform like Microsoft's Business Central, it allows you to choose the data residency. The replication is also within that country and the data does not cross borders. It's really nice.

I used to be a privacy officer for a community living organization and having this kind of understanding and a system like this made my job much easier.

I will hand this back to Gary if his Internet is going to cooperate for the AI part.

Gary Servius 15:59

All right, so hopefully you can hear me now and my Internet is OK and it's going to work perfectly. All right, so, so far so good it seems. OK, so AI, this is a big one, right? So Chat DPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, there's many of them.

Out there, right? And obviously the typical way to use those AI is just to put your question in the chat and and look for information all over the Internet for you. So the first question that most people will have rightfully is that whoa, whoa, wait a minute, right? Where does my information goes? Who have access to this?

And the myth that we hear, the myth that we hear very often, AI means losing control of your data, right?

So let me start by saying that I don't know anything about all of the solution that I just listed and how they interact with all the ERP solution, what AI tool may be available to you, how this work. So all I can say about this is.

Use them at your own risk. What I can tell you about is the Microsoft Copilot and how it actually works with Business Central and Spark Rock. So Copilot in Microsoft Business Central and Spark Rock operates entirely within your Microsoft tenant, right? Meaning that your data stay inside the same.

Secure Microsoft environment. It respects existing role based security, right? So user can only access the information that you're already permitted to see, right? And just as importantly, right, your organization data is not used to train public AI models and that's a big concern out there, right?

And Copilot does not trap random external sources to generate answers, right? Instead, what you have is that the AI is actually designed to assist user, not to replace your decision making. I agree to assist user. I did help with task.

Such as pulling existing report, generating report, performing calculation, speed up your work, right? Allowing your team to focus on higher value activities, right? And really the the copilot can be just like enable or disable as you wish and all the activity still happen.

Within the governance, security and compliance framework already in place with the Microsoft cloud. So at the end, Copilot is really a tool that is here to assist your team, make your life easier, right? And it's built on the layer of security and privacy that are built into the Microsoft environment.

All right, so now we're going to move to the common questions and consideration, and I'm going to pass it back to Kinley to cover this section.

Kinley Graham 18:54

All right. So after again, after the last session, we had a few very common questions that came up. One of the first ones was what actually needs to move. So because Business Central is a natural upgrade path for GP, there is a migration tool. The migration tool will.

Help bring forward customers, vendors and it will bring forward GL entries. Now that is a good starting place.

You have to ask yourself some very key questions when you go about this, and I very much like the very bottom point here. Auditors don't want 20 years of data in your active ERP. There's lots of ways to handle this. It could be stored in a SQL database that you just keep it there. Certain systems you can export to Excel. We've seen lots of different things.

GP is on premise. GP can be maintained on on premise as a system that can continue to be reported on. There are lots of solutions to this, but when you go to migrate, one of the key things is cleaning up your data. Customers and vendors that you haven't used in 1358 years.

You would very much like to get rid of. There might be duplicate vendors in there, duplicate customers, GL accounts you no longer use. There are lots of pieces here that go on. So it's a good thing to go through and work with your implementation partner to figure out what you need, what you don't, how to archive it, how to store it, and.

That's a part of our standard, standard process, figuring out what transactions need to be brought over for what time period is it balances up to the end of the previous fiscal year and then detail for the current year. Sometimes that's exactly what customers need.

Sometimes the year previous, they want incremental monthly balances to compare year over year. All of that is definitely possible, but it's good to have the actual discussion to figure out what you actually need to bring forward.

This one came up. When is the right time? And everyone's right time is really different and we're going to get to another slide shortly that goes into time and resourcing. But the right time is really about when you have the resources available to go through this.

Waiting until the last minute does have a lot of risks. We talked about that in the previous webinar and Gary alluded to that earlier in this one. So waiting till the end is really not a great solution. Then you're rushed, you have security risks, you have a timeline crunch, you have to get it done if other.

Large priorities come up. It's kind of hard to push it off. It's not a good situation for anyone. The early movers, people that have probably already moved or people that are in process of looking now, have a lot of benefits. You have the ability to shop around and figure out what other systems you want to connect to.

How many different things one ERP can take into account? Because maybe if you're using Great Plains, you could also be using Nexonia for expenses or something like that. Looking for a solution that combines those is something you can do, especially if you start the process early.

The middle wave is usually where most people kind of target and they want to go. The downside there is, as the point says, there could be resource constraints on the vendor side or on your side. So it's better to start now, get it going, figure out what you're going to accomplish, get the right information internally and then go.

Go forward. OK, how much of my team is an implementation going to consume? This purposely does not just say time. These kind of things can be a little stressful on people. It is change. Not everyone loves change.

So the key points here are that your team needs to be engaged in what's going on. The more you involve them, the more part of it they will feel, and the change won't be as hard. We know that people don't like change even more so when they're super busy.

But taking advantage of having people involved in it makes them feel like they're a part of it.

Part of it.

Your implementation partner is going to handle the configuration, they're going to handle the migration, they're going to handle the setup. What they're going to need you for is to tell them what works, what doesn't work, help clean up the data, and then it's the testing and validation that really provides the returns to your team.

When you do detailed testing and validation on the system prior to going live, it not only makes sure everything is going to work properly, but it also makes sure people understand how to use the system. It has a lot of benefits.

So the time isn't consistent. It's going to depend what other systems are you removing? What functionality are you adding? How are you changing process flows? While it might take up some time at the beginning to discuss these things, when you go live and after, it's going to save you tons and tons and tons of time.

So the actual time it takes is very much spread out. That validation piece and training is one of the most important bits.

OK. What are the hidden costs? OK, again, this comes back to the previous slide when we talk about how much time it's going to take and how much resources it's going to take and everything like that. So you're all super busy. You're all probably doing multiple jobs. Trying to take on an implementation takes.

Bunch of work. So it's trying to figure out the times when you have the capacity to do this. Sometimes backfill will be a blessing in disguise. It might cost a little more money, but the pressure it takes off everything else and the timeline improvements that come with that, it can be worth it. But it's one of those things to try and figure.

At the beginning, work with your implementation partner. You'll have a project manager and work out the schedule that makes sense so that you can avoid most of those hidden costs going and setting up.

Absolutely everything, and having not had the conversation with your staff can result in having to redo things. Redoing things isn't the absolute end of the world, but it can increase cost. So having those discussions ahead of time and flowing through the plan will result in a much lower overall cost.

OK, can I integrate my current solutions with the ERP? These platforms usually, Business Central especially, has lots and lots of API connection points. Spark Rock solution has a bunch of extra ones. So the answer is as long as the other system has APIs, you can usually find a way to integrate.

Things, but don't immediately assume that integrating everything is the right way to go. I would stop and go and look at what I'm trying to do. I mentioned Nexonia earlier as an example. Lots of solutions have expenses, credit card management, lots of things like that built in.

If you can get the solution that you want that has those things built in, not only do you remove the GP annual fees and licensing fees, but you can also remove it to other platforms. We have seen lots of different integrations in lots of different areas.

And if you look at the vendors, you can find ways to get vendors that have multiple things that don't require those integrations and connections. By doing that, you end up with one source of truth, immediacy of information. Reporting becomes much simpler. It works fantastically and users all go to one place.

To get all the information they need and it just it makes it much easier.

All right, I'm going to hand this back to Gary now. And if you have any other questions, just throw them in the chat. Happy to answer anything and take it away, Gary.

Gary Servius 26:42

All right. Thanks, Kinley. So hopefully my Internet will keep on collaborating and if it doesn't, then I apologize in advance. All right. So that lead us to very important questions, right? A lot of you imagine that chat maybe, maybe.

Never heard about Sparkrog before, so a big question would be what is Sparkrog, right? So Sparkrog is an organization that's been around for 23 years, right? And from the very beginning we always partnered with Microsoft. So you have 22 years of a very strong.

Deep partnership with Microsoft that allows us to actually offer the most robust, secure, innovative infrastructure and ecosystem to our clients. So today we have a huge presence all across North America with hundreds of thousands of users spread over the US and all over.

And our organization has a huge and fairly unique particularity is that we do not provide services or solution to businesses. We are 100% nonprofit focused.

Our latest and greatest solution is called Spark Rock Impact and earlier during this webinar I mentioned that Microsoft Business Central, even though it was supposed to be the natural upgrade path from GP.

Remains a solution built for businesses, right? And as we also discussed earlier, like the generic ERP solution do not work for nonprofit, right? Reporting, budgeting.

Project accounting, right? Those are area where non-profit have the most pain and those solution remain extremely limited because they were not built for that.

On the other end, you have the Spark Rock Impact that is a solution with all the automation around your everyday task, your expense claim, your credit card reconciliation with a powerful pre-chest to pay workflow, full visibility and control over your budget, the ability to track grant and program in real time, right. It's really.

A solution that is really designed to help nonprofit to reduce manual work, eliminate errors, streamline the process, improve visibility, right? Really ensure compliance with your funders and audit requirements and even beyond finance, as you can see on the screen, right, you can easily support payroll HR benefits.

Fade rules across multiple union and so much more, right? And the beauty of that system is that it is actually built on top of Microsoft Dynamic Business Central and sits and live within the Microsoft Dynamic 365 environment, right?

So remember I told you that Microsoft has designed Business Central as natural and logical upgrade path from Microsoft GP. So with Spark Rock being built on Business Central, you can take advantage of this right? You have the benefit of Microsoft infrastructure.

The security, the stability, the interconnectivity within the Microsoft ecosystem, right? You have it all. And this is actually how Microsoft still provide a perfect upgrade path to nonprofit coming from GP by relying on solution like Spark Rock.

And really, you are benefiting from the entire framework built by Microsoft, but you're also benefiting from layers and layers of capabilities and features that were designed specifically for nonprofits, thanks to 23 years of experience, expertise and deep knowledge.

In the sector and when we talk about those layers and layers right of functionality, here's a slide that will make it perfectly clear or I hope at least right where you can see the extent of the module available within Sparkrock that give you an idea of what we can do, right? And when Kilia was talking earlier.

About all those different solution and tools that you may be using and see that you can actually centralize everything into one solution when whenever possible, right?

We'll just an insanity, right?

What we would like to show is the level of functionalities that we had it on top of Business Central to meet the needs and requirements of nonprofits, right. The module that you see here in purple, the AR, the inventory management, the cash management, right, those are the module.

From Business Central that we touch the list, we modify or improve less than 50% of those functionalities. When you're looking at the one in blue, right, we actually tremendously improve the original functionality by more than 50%.

To meet the needs of one non-profit customer and you look at AP, fixed asset, budget management, GL, purchasing, even Power BI, right, which is already huge, right? But then when we look at the functionalities in yellow.

Or orange ish rate. Those are 100% spark rock. Those functionality do not exist at all in Business Central and we're 100% built for you. Those and those are absolutely critical for non-profit. You have the fund accounting, project and grant accounting, requisition management, commitment and encumbrances, the expense claim.

Right, the entire HR and payroll and so on.

And this is not just a bunch of modules, right? What you see is one single solution, one single application that is fully integrated. So all those modules that you see are interconnected. And to go even further, right, our solution is actually backed by real sector expertise and experience.

The men and women, the people that drive organization forward, right? And that are for the most part coming from the nonprofit world.

On the screen here, you're seeing some of our colleagues, right? They are their customer success manager or support team, our project managers or consultant, right? They have been in your shoes. They understand your challenges. They've led a countless number of GP migration, right?

They know what it takes to actually lead to a successful migration and those are the phases that create growth and successful customer every single day.

And I will just finally end this part of the the presentation by the most important and you guessed it right, our customers. So today we have more than 100,000 active users all across North America.

And on the screen here, we just added a small tiny sample of valuable customers that trusted us and had made the choice to partner with us and hopefully maybe in the near future, right, you will, we will have the pleasure to count you as well as one of our customer.

So now we're just going to take a few minutes to see what your solution in action. So I'm going to add it over to Wendy for a quick demo on what the modern solution I could do for you.

Wendy Brown 34:07

Thank you, Gary. Hello again everyone. Let me just share my screen and while I'm doing that, So what I want to demonstrate to you today is how Sparkrock has extended Business Central.

To include the new functionality that you saw on the visual that that Gary was sharing there earlier and so specifically what we see for.

Organizations coming from GP when it comes to business processes like purchasing requests or managing your credit card or expense claims or approval workflows. Often those are not managed inside your GP instance today.

We've seen is that you're either managing those using a third party tool as Kinley mentioned, or using off of your desk processes like Microsoft Excel or e-mail chains.

So what we do at Spark Rock is we have extended the capabilities on top of Business Central to give you those workflows and features right within the ERP system.

So what we're looking at right now of course is the Business Central interface, but we are going to focus today on the My Sparkrock interface. And so the My Sparkrock interface is designed to give a UI a user experience for those employees.

Who need to do purchase requisitions or expense claims or run reports or maybe even approvals approve things. So where I'm going to start off here. So we're here in in my spark rock.

Which is directly connected with all of the rules and permissions that are configured in the back office and you can see through the menus here that I have many features available to me.

We're going to start off specifically looking at the purchase requisition process. And so in some cases we have customers who want every employee in their organization to be able to kick off a purchase request. And so in some cases that's over 10,000 people which.

As I saw in the chat poll here, cost is really one of your number one concerns, costs and licensing and so this is definitely a tool to help you with that. But kicking off a new purchase request process is as simple as clicking on new and then going through.

The.

The steps. So first of all, the first thing I'm going to do is select a purchase requisition type. And so the purchase requisition type can kick off different workflows based upon again the configuration of the approval workflows in the back office. So we're just going to do a standard order here.

And I'm just gonna call this my impact webinar. And so this is the purchase request header and here we can see that we're able to attach documents. So for example if I had received a quote.

From the vendor for this purchase thing I'm purchasing, I could add that attachment here. If I need to leave any internal or external comments, I can add those here. The difference between the internal and external is that the external comment will also appear on the purchase order that.

Gets created out of this process. So then from there we go into the purchase line details and so I'm just going to very simply click on add expense and so these are what we call expense types and so I'm able to search these using.

Different categories or searching terms and once I make my selection, so for example I'm just going to choose this meeting supplies selection. You can see it's actually even defaulted A vendor for this based upon the expense type.

Type setup and in previous presentations you would have been introduced of course to the chart of accounts, your GL, your dimensions, and Sparkrock extends that further to include account sets, which really just makes it easier for these end users.

That need to code transactions, so I'm going to use an account set which is going to bring in all of the GL and dimensions that are relevant. I would put in the quantity of items that I'm purchasing and what is the cost of these items. So maybe I'm getting 30.

Items at $30 each and so if we need to add additional lines we can do so and I'm just going to save this particular line. And again, if I needed to add additional lines to this purchase requisition, I would just click on add expense.

You're able to verify who the approvers are based upon the workflow that's configured in the back office, which can include approval workflows by dimensions, GL, location, purchase request type, dollar value, of course, to name a few.

And so we're going to go ahead and submit this for approval. And so there's an e-mail, of course, notification that's going to go to the approver. And just to show you, I'm going to come into just quickly. I'm going to bring in my approver person here. So that's me again here.

It's still in my spark rock. I'm able to go to my finance approvals and we're able to see this purchase requisition right here at the bottom is the one that we just entered. And so to approve this, I'm able to review it. I can see related documents, any comments.

Comments and so on, right down to those purchase requests lines. I can also see the budget and so could the submitter see the budget. So full transparency, full accountability across your entire organization.

So we are able to see the budget as well as any encumbrances against the budget and the ability to drill down on those encumbrances if you need to know what those are from here. Then I would just go ahead and approve this and then that gets picked up by the purchasing.

Workflow. So the creation of the purchase order which makes the commitment to the vendor and then from there I'm just going to put back on my original requester hat. So here I am where we started Chris Robinson and so they made the request.

So what happens when those goods are received? Usually it's the requester who's going to receive them, but not necessarily always. But that's the scenario we'll look at here today. So you are able to come in to see all the purchase orders, their status, and what is ready to be received.

So this example here from Metro Business Equipment, I've received the goods, which in this case as we look at the lines, we can see with some office supplies and so very simply I'm able to do a full or partial receipt. I'm just going to click on receive.

And it's giving me a little prompt and I'm going to just continue and now that's going to move into a receive status and then it gets picked up by your accounts payables workflow.

Other capabilities that are available here in the my Sparkrock functionality is of course the ability to do your expense claims. So coming into the expense claims area, you.

Also, we'll see in here any corporate credit card purchases. So when that credit card statement comes from the bank, I know which one of my employees are responsible for the credit card and they automatically flow into their my Sparkrock expense area for them to.

Code and then send back through the process to create a new expense. I'm very simply just going to click on new expense and in here again just like similar to what we saw when we were.

Doing a requisition, we are able to select from expense types and the expense types allows you to put different controls like for this expense type, should it be available on an expense claim? Should this expense type be available on a purchase request? Should this expense type?

Be available on a payment request, so you have very granular control. But at the end of the day, it's also going to check that you're following the rules. So for example, let's put $20 in here. So you're going to see right away I have an alert up at the top right. It tells me the match.

Maximum value for breakfast. The maximum expense amount based upon our policies is $16.00. So it just reduced my $20 to $16.00 automatically as that's the maximum our this organization is going to pay for reimbursing breakfast.

And so again, they're able to attach receipts. If I was on my smart device, my mobile phone for example, this process of adding the receipt could also bring up your camera. You could take the picture and add it all at the same time. This is a mobile first.

Experience. So it's built specifically for mobile devices. Now my last step here in in in entering this expense claim is to select my account set if it's required. So again the account set. So this is all driven through.

Securities and what am I allowed to see when it comes to data, GLS, account sets, dimensions and so on. And so in this case I only have two account sets that I can choose between and so I'm going to choose one here.

And then save that. And so I would be able to continue adding additional expenses, including mileage for example, a common use case for the expense claim process.

And so when you're entering your mileage expenses, we're going to track automatically how much mileage you've claimed for a year to date. So this helps you adhere to those Revenue Canada rules.

If you're here in Canada or other jurisdictions where you need to change the rate of reimbursement based once they reach 5000 kilometers, for example, you can see here that we also do support to known location to known location, so the distances are already.

Within the system. So they just need to select the location, whether it was a round trip, and again, we're going to tag the account set that goes with this.

When it's time to make that expense claim, I would just select the ones that I want to submit for an expense claim. And so in this case we have our breakfast and our mileage and I'll just click on make a new claim so.

As you can see, this is a very easy to use interface. Our customers really appreciate the how the simplicity of it, but still adhering to all those robust rules that you have in the background when it comes to the approval workflow.

And best of all, this is all contained within your ERP. It's not a separate system. You have full audit visibility as you as you go through that. So again, in this final expense claim, I'm able to review the budget giving me.

Ownership and ensuring that I'm not overspending for the organization. And so once I have created my claim, I would just submit that. So in this case it's going to create one expense claim with two line items for the approver to review.

A few other things I want to point out while we're here in the MySparkRock user interface. So again, as we look down the left hand side and expand some of these additional menus, reporting is a big driver wanting to allow departments.

Department managers to be able to pull reports on what's going on in their areas of activity. And so the financial analysis tool allows you to push out reporting using different variables, including GLS dimensions.

And so, for example, I'm just going to choose this department view. For example, it has a date range that's defaulted from the data set, and now I'm able to view for this department. In this case, I have two that are visible to me, Administration and Education. I'm able to.

See my budget, my commitments. So those are my purchase requests, my actuals, those are my invoices, and encumbrances are my purchase orders. And to the far right we can see how much of my budget I actually have available for those data sets.

So this is very helpful for again finding the information out about maybe it's a specific fund or funder, grants and so on, allowing you to get that full transparency right here from mysparkrock.

Exploring a few other features here, we would also support the ability for you to for those users. Let's say they're going to be on vacation. So Chris here is going to go on vacation soon. Spring break's coming up and he's taking.

And his kids skiing out here in a beautiful BC. And so for he was able to choose based upon the available alternates. He's able to choose specifically who will be his alternate and for what date.

And So what that means is that if this user is an approver, that all new approvals coming in around these dates would be sent to this alternate approver.

Now what you're going to see also on the back end is that the administrators of the system are going to have full transparency over that and can also adjust that if maybe this approver is only available for a couple of the days of the way I'm away and I need to add another approval.

Approver for the other day so you have that flexibility here. Now also on the left hand side you will have noticed that we have some additional options here such as the users being able to define how they want to receive their notifications.

So do I want to receive notifications as my purchase requests go through the process? So I'll be notified when it's approved, when it's received, and so on. Similarly, as we look at the options here below that, we have external links.

So this allows you to push out URLs to other resources within your organization. For example, one of the options I have here is our Sparky AI, and Sparky AI is continuous innovation.

Right now you'll see that it's available in our help files. So for example, if I wanted to ask it, how do I file an expense claim? And so it's looking at not only at our manuals but also our help resources.

And solution articles that our support team have developed to bring you back the answers. You'll also see whenever you're using the AI tools, whether it's Sparky AI, which is built on copilot or the copilot within the back end finance solution, it's always going to give you a.

Reference of where it got the answer from. So in addition to that, it's giving me very clear step by step instructions on how to create an expense claim and submit an expense claim.

As we look to the future and innovation on Sparky AI, you can look forward to your own Sparky being able to look up data and answer questions against your own documents, whether that's policy documents.

Business reports, you are able, you will be able to have your own Sparky AI experience. Coming back here, where I'm going to go to now is I'm going to just come into the back office here.

And.

Bring this guy over so I'm a different user. Now this is my full admin user and I'm going to come into what we call the my Arkrock set.

Our user setup. Sorry, there we go. My Spark Rock user setups. And so let's look specifically at demo one. So that was our My Spark Rock user that was doing the purchase requisitions.

And this is also the user that created the alternate. So as the administrator of this system, I'm able to see any alternates that may have been configured within here, and you're also able to change it in here as well.

What you're going to see here as we look below, we're going to see the ability to put security filters on those my sparkrite experiences. So for example, in the demo environment I have set up, I have a filter on.

Which departments I'm actually able to see, but those filters could be much more robust, so they could be by any GL or GL range. So for example if I wanted to limit that or by any one of our dimensions, so I would be able to.

Specify, maybe this user is only able to see grant A for example. So these controls are all going to drive the experience.

Of of what I see on my Sparkrock is as far as which data GL's account codes I'm able to use to tag my purchase requests or expense claims.

Now when we think about that approval workflow, so the approval workflow for what we just went through is all driven through our finance approval rules. And so I'm just going to bring those up very quickly for us here and.

So what we see here is we have various rules and we have different approver types including approver groups or direct approvers. So when you have an approval group for example.

When you look at the approval group, you can have multiple approvers in there. Let me see if we got a good example here. So here's a great example. So this is an approval group. There's three approvers in there. We actually have them sequenced 123. So what that rule?

Means is that the approval's first going to go to the first approver. Once they approve it, it's going to go to the 2nd and so on. If they were all at a sequence of one, then all of these people would get the approval request all at the same time. And again, you can have rules whether all need to approve or maybe some of them.

Are for notification only. So that was a quick mini demo to demonstrate how Sparkrock has extended functionality on top of Business Central to specifically meet the needs and workflow needs of nonprofit organizations.

So with that, I'm going to hand it back to Bree.

Bri-anna Ramsden 56:37

Thanks, Wendy. That was great. So over the last few minutes, if you guys have any questions, feel free to throw them in the Q&A and chat. But I did have a few come in already, so I'm going to ask Gary and Kinley to give me a little help answering these. The first one is who has my data and how are my backups handled in Business Central?

Well.

Kinley Graham 56:58

I I should have answered that in in in my part when I was talking about the environments. OK, I talked about data residency and all that great stuff and the security of the environments, but with Business Central, it actually goes into your tenant.

So Spark Rock, for example, doesn't have back-end access to your data unless you you grant it to us. Since it's in your tenant, you have the ability to go into this Business Central admin panel, click one button, and you can actually extract a full backpack of your entire database. So your data is 100% yours.

You control all access to that data. You control everything to do with it. That backup can be extracted whenever you want and you can keep it. You don't need it though, because all the data is replicated in multiple places within the country you've chosen.

And you have lots of restore points basically wherever you want. It's all on demand on your own through Microsoft.

Bri-anna Ramsden 57:59

Now the second question I have is do we need to purchase Business Central licenses first to use spark rock?

Gary Servius 58:08

All right, so I can take that one. So the answer is pretty straightforward actually. So no, you do not need to purchase a Microsoft Business Central license or any license for you to use Sparkrog or any other license for you to use Sparkrog, right? So Sparkrog license actually come with Business Central as one.

Application, right? So if you are interested to explore our solution, there is no prerequisite, right? There's no prerequirement. Just reach out to us and we'll be here to about.

Bri-anna Ramsden 58:42

Gary, now for my most important question, when I finish a webinar, I have questions well after the fact. I do not remember in the session what I should be asking. So what should everyone do if they have a question, say in an hour or two?

Gary Servius 58:57

You know you just like me, right? So is it always like pop up afters like oh shoot, I forget to ask. So if you have questions, if you need any more information, if you need clarity maybe on the on the migration uh process or if you just want to say hi, please reach out directly. Uh, you can reach out directly to me.

At gary.serius@sparkrock.com actually going to drop in the in the chat so you have my contact right there.

There you go. So don't be shy. Please reach out. We're here to help. We're here to assist. Even if you in the early stage, you're not sure. We are here to give some guidance and provide as much advice as we can.

Bri-anna Ramsden 59:53

I want to thank everyone for coming today and Elizabeth, I will have Gary reach out to you personally for your question. If you have any questions again, feel free to reach out and this recording will be sent to you within five business days. Thank you, Gary, Kinley and Wendy and everyone have a great day.

Wendy Brown 1:00:10

Thanks everyone.

Kinley Graham 1:00:11

Thanks everyone.

Gary Servius 1:00:11

So yeah.

Wendy Brown 1:00:12

Bye.

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