Armidale Catholic Schools: Building Confidence in School Reporting

About Armidale Catholic Schools

Armidale Catholic Schools comprises 24 schools; 19 primary, 1 K-10, 1 K-12 and 3 secondary schools. We educate around 6000 students, and employ approximately 1000 staff. Our schools spread across a wide regional, rural and remote geographical area over the New England and North West regions of NSW.

The Armidale Catholic Schools Office provides system support to schools across a range of areas including; employment services, finance, facilities, ICT, mission, learning, marketing and administration.

From Complex Reporting to Clearer Insight

When the Armidale Catholic Schools set out to modernise their budgeting and reporting processes, the goal was simple: give schools clearer, more reliable financial insights without adding to the administrative burden.

After years of wrestling with complex, hard-to-interpret TechOne reports, the finance team knew they needed something easier, faster, and more intuitive, not just for themselves, but for school principals who are constantly stretched across competing priorities. For Armidale Catholic Schools (ACS), the difference was immediate.

“Reports can be built and then replicated across all schools at the click of a button.”

For a diocese covering long distances and varied school contexts, this level of scalability and simplicity is a game-changer. Principals don’t have time to decode five-page financial statements. They want clarity, visibility, and confidence – Workday Adaptive Planning finally gives them that.

“We wanted something simple. Principals are busy; their eyes glaze over when they see overly technical reports. Adaptive Planning lets us present a clean, easy-to-read profit and loss so they can understand their position straight away.”

Clearer, More Consistent Reporting Across Schools

While the diocesan team plans to fully adopt Workday Adaptive Planning for budgeting in their next cycle, the framework is already in place for something far more powerful: a unified, consistent approach to financial management across every school.

With Workday Adaptive Planning, school P&Ls can be rolled up, analysed, and distributed far more efficiently. Finance officers can drill into variances, principals can see their bottom line at a glance, and the diocese can trust that everyone is working from the same version of the truth.

“Workday removes the hidden risks of spreadsheets. With the data coming straight from Workday, you know that it can be trusted.”

Supporting Strategic Decision-Making

Beyond school-level reporting, the diocese is also using Workday Adaptive Planning to support longer-term strategic questions including, multi-year staffing projections, capital planning, and understanding enrolment trends across regions.

“We can now produce meaningful multi-year projections and can give quality information to the board, such as, whether a new school would be viable in a particular area.”

This level of analysis was simply not possible with TechOne outputs alone.

A Partnership That Made the Difference

What stood out for Armidale Catholic Schools most was the support from the GK Horizons team.

“The GKH consultants were excellent – very responsive, very clear, and no question was ever too trivial. The GKH Project Lead was adept at helping us get back on track when things got busy. The whole team was great to work with.”

Despite significant challenges, heavy workloads, long travel days to remote schools, the project remained positive, adaptive, and well-supported.

“We relied heavily on GK Horizons because we just didn’t have the internal time. Their support made a huge difference.”