Church Missionary Society - Australia choose Professional Advantage

The Church Missionary Society - Australia (CMS-A) have recently transferred their Dynamics GP support to Professional Advantage, and we are very happy to call them one of our clients.

The Church Missionary Society (CMS) was founded in England in 1799 by a small group of Anglican evangelicals with a passion for worldwide gospel outreach. By 1825, this passion had spread to Australia with a CMS outpost set up in Sydney and missionaries from England arriving shortly afterwards.

In 1916, the Australian CMS associations came together to form the Church Missions Association of Australia, later changing their name to the Church Missionary Society of Australia.

More than 1500 Australians have now served with CMS-A, with missionaries serving in countries including Tanzania, Chile, Ethiopia, Japan, and in North Australia.

Whilst our initial contact with CMS-A reaches back as far as 2013, it was only late last year (2018) that everything aligned and Professional Advantage (PA) took over their Dynamics GP support. It was over those 5 years that they became familiar with PA and identified that we were a stable provider, so when the time was right for them to transfer, PA was top of their list.

One of the first acts as their support partner was to complete an Achieve More Review. Aligning with PA’s benefit statement to ‘Achieve More’, this review was performed on site by one of our skilled consultants and looked in to their processes and financial systems, and focussed upon improvements, areas where problems arose, and ultimately making a plan for the future.

When asked how CMS-A would describe their overall experience with transferring their support to PA, they answered:

"Overall, 10 out of 10. We really appreciated the amount of time PA invested with us, which allowed us time to understand and absorb everything, rather than feeling pushed. We were appreciative that the PA consultant had previously been an accountant, so had all of that experience to support their GP knowledge. Initially we weren't expecting a lot, but were pleasantly surprised by the end result and how productive the time had been."

CMS-A is a Not-for-Profit, which is an industry that PA is experienced within, specifically having a long history of NFPs within Dynamics GP. This meant that we already knew all the integral information regarding the financial workings of the organisation. 

From the Achieve More Review, three phases were established which divided the now determined aims and improvements in to high-level, medium-level, and low-level priority. This ensured the tasks were divided in to small, workable segments, with a programme of logical steps allowing an improvement to be initiated, worked with, and fully understood before moving on to the next item. These three phases will be completed over the coming six months; the first phase begins this week with the presence of two PA consultants on site. This beginning stage will improve their current systems and implement new modules to extend the functionality of their system.

When asked what advice they would give to anyone contemplating transferring their Dynamics GP support service to Professional Advantage, they said: "Do it!"