As NEXTDC’s first employee, Head of Finance Nick Choy has helped develop and grow its finance discipline and capabilities. The rapid expansion and evolution of the business meant that its on-premise accounting system was not able to deliver to business requirements and had multiple sources of the truth. “We had disparate Excel spreadsheets and a dozen other systems and processes that were not integrated and not talking to each other,” Choy recalls. “To modernize our systems and processes to support growth well into the next decade, we needed a single scalable, agile platform.”
NEXTDC chose Workday for its true cloud architecture, powerful data integration capabilities, automated workflows, and shared values. “We strongly align with Workday around customer experience and innovation,” explains Choy. “We were particularly interested that, with Workday, we’d get business capabilities already infused with AI and machine learning.
Morphing finance into a business partner.Workday helped NEXTDC to move quickly to automated accounting and financial consolidation. Freed from the tyranny of spreadsheets, members of the finance team are now able to spend more time with the business. “We are becoming a value-adding partner to the business because Workday automates a lot of the manual tasks that our finance and accounting teams traditionally used to do,” says Choy.
Choy is a big fan of Workday AI-powered services such as supplier invoice automation, which uses rules-based work queues and header-level scanning to direct invoices to the right person; and journal insights, which detects anomalies in accounting entries by comparing them to other entries for similar transactions. “Because journal insights identifies anomalies as they occur, reconciliation issues are corrected as they happen, not during the crunch at month-end close,” Choy notes.
Workday is weaving AI and machine learning into every aspect of our accounting and finance solutions to save us time, improve accuracy, and reduce stress.
Head of Finance
Making the right decisions on the fly.
With all of its staff, including contractors, on one easy-to-use platform, the business now has up-to-date critical information to support evidence-based decisions. “As a business leader, it is crucial to have accurate and real-time information,” says Choy. “Workday provides insights that allow our teams to make rapid decisions, confident that the actions we are taking will result in the intended outcome.”
The real-time decisions Workday supports allow NEXTDC to continue to innovate and adapt in an ever-changing world.
Head of Finance
Setting up finance to support international growth.
Choy is pleased that Workday is expressly designed to support global growth requirements, with multicurrency, multilanguage, and multibook capabilities built into the core system.
“With Workday’s multilingual, multicurrency capability, NEXTDC is ready to expand into almost any country and achieve its growth ambitions.”