Screenrights Australia balances the use of free-to-air broadcast recordings for educational purposes, and the rights of the content owners. They charge educational facilities an annual licensing fee, then distribute the money amongst content owners. For an organisation with such unusual needs, MYOB Advanced Business was the best, and only, fit.
A one-of-a-kind organisation
Screenrights Australia is an organisation like no other, says Mike Lynch, their Chief Information Officer. They return $45 million a year with no competitors, no marketing, only 45 staff, and “97% market penetration before we get out of bed.”
With millions of statement lines each month, they also store information to define ownership of each piece of content, and of its various components: visual arts, the music, the sound or scripts. It’s why most of their software had been custom-built in-house.
Customer support on their existing solution was becoming ever more lacklustre, with “nightmare” upgrades and a development roadmap that simply didn’t align with Screenrights’ needs.
Reporting holding the organisation back
As Mike says, the organisation was “stuck between small business software that didn’t cut it, and large systems like SAP, that were overkill for what we wanted.”
The existing system required that two separate databases be queried, and even with hours of manual manipulation and the possibility of errors, it still wasn’t producing meaningful reports.
“The board was giving us heaps, and meanwhile we had an accountant with an MBA, a serious talent who was essentially an Excel jockey! She should have been doing strategic work for the future company, but instead we had her making up for the inadequacies of a failed system.”
- Mike Lynch, Chief Information Officer, Screenrights Australia
Big business smarts
Screenrights struggled to find software to fit their “weird requirements.”
Mike liked Xero, but knew it couldn’t have handled the transaction volumes. “We would have died waiting for a month-end report,” he quips.
MYOB Advanced won the day after one and five-year total cost of ownership comparisons, and for its “superior” reporting capability. Advanced would also remove a lot of manual inputting.
"The capability is superior. Advanced lets us slice and dice the data – that flexibility was right for us."
The Screenrights team did much of the implementation themselves, and with support from their MYOB business partner, stuck to the tight three-month timeframe.
Reporting now a nonissue
Mike says Advanced’s reporting “ticks all boxes.” The board is so satisfied, he says reporting is no longer on the agenda.
“The reputation of the finance division is improved, too,” he adds. “I don’t think you can get a stronger endorsement than that. It’s definitive source – and that’s not where we were.”
Better integration between the finance and licensing departments has delivered far better control over aged debtors.
And as team members move from spreadsheeting onto more valuable tasks, Mike has seen an “uplift in quality. It got us out of the weeds. It’s delivered everything I hoped.”
"We’ve seen an uplift in quality but done by the same small team. It got us out of the weeds. It’s delivered everything I hoped."
Before MYOB Advanced Business | After MYOB Advanced Business |
|---|---|
Valuable staff wasting time on spreadsheeting and manual data entry Reporting unreliable, out of date and hard to interpret Lack of integration causing inefficiencies | Manual entry almost eliminated and staff refocused on value-add tasks Board has easy-to-understand, reliable reporting An uplift in quality across the company, without adding man-hours |
