Australian Industry Trade College (AITC) is an independent, senior school for young people located in Robina, Cleveland, Toowoomba, Ipswich and the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Students in Years 10, 11 and 12 undertake school-based apprenticeships or traineeships which include paid work placements and the opportunity to complete vocational education training in the student's chosen area.
Established in 2008 by industry leaders, AITC is one of only two Trade Colleges in Queensland and one of four in Australia. AITC is a not for profit company governed by a Board of Directors appointed from a broad range of industries.
AITC implemented the Budgeting and Reporting Modules of IDU in 2019. At the time the organisation had embarked on an aggressive growth strategy that included the establishment of multiple campuses across South East Queensland. This expansion incorporated several new campuses, each requiring a set of accounts, budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis.
This required rigorous budgeting, forecasting and variance analysis for each individual campus from its establishment (project stage) through to maturity.
In addition, the College is run as a system with a centralised shared services infrastructure (hub-and-spoke model) that requires strict expense management and accurate cost allocation across the campuses.
Before IDU, budgeting and reporting was being done using spreadsheets that were imported into the accounting system and it was dependent on one or two individuals knowing all the links and drivers in the spreadsheets.
AITC wanted better financial governance that ensured valid, accurate and complete financial information, they required continuity in the setting and interpretation of budget and forecast assumptions and needed to expedite the preparation, analysis and distribution of financial results to inform better decision making.
idu-Concept is a web-based, budgeting, forecasting and reporting solution with a dominant presence in the education sector. The solution is cost-effective and is deployed quickly with little to no ongoing IT involvement required.
The IDU solution automates tedious manual processes in turn freeing up and empowering the finance team to be more agile and strategic.
"IDU has afforded our College the ability to implement and enforce good financial governance, provide transparency of financial information, enable internal and external benchmarking per campus or per region, and to instill a culture of financial accountability at all management levels.
IDU has made the planning of future growth so much simpler as the relevant assumptions and their dependencies are set up in the system, expediting forecasting and scenario analysis.
idu-Concept is an extremely flexible financial management tool, allowing for significant creativity by the administrators, it's fairly simple to administer and can provide a fun experience for the end-user." - Bobbette van Zyl, Head of Central Services