Enterprise ERP Modernisation for a Multi-Campus Academy Trust
CYVERRA consolidated fragmented legacy systems across 28 school sites into a unified cloud ERP architecture covering finance, procurement, and workforce planning. The implementation streamlined central governance and delivered automated real-time statutory reporting across all institutions.
Independent education trust operating 28 primary and secondary schools
- -65%
- Month-end close time
- -48%
- Invoice processing cycle
- -55%
- Reporting preparation time
- 99.2%
- Automated ledger reconciliation
The Challenge
Following a multi-year expansion, the trust operated across a patchwork of disparate financial packages, localized spreadsheets, and separate HR databases. This fragmented application landscape created substantial data reconciliation burdens for central finance and impeded executive visibility into school-level operational expenditure. Individual school administrative teams spent excessive hours manually re-keying supplier invoices, tracking capital works expenditure, and preparing monthly journal entries. The absence of a standardised chart of accounts made consolidated budgeting and mandatory Department for Education statutory reporting complex, labour-intensive, and prone to cross-entity variances.
Our Approach
CYVERRA led an end-to-end ERP implementation built on a multi-entity cloud platform, designing a unified chart of accounts and standard operating procedures across all 28 campuses. The architecture established automated inter-entity transaction processing, centralised bank reconciliation, and automated approval workflows tailored to designated delegation limits. To ensure operational continuity, CYVERRA engineered bespoke data ingestion pipelines to clean and migrate historical ledger data from six legacy systems into the new core. Integration endpoints were deployed to synchronize staff records and departmental structures with existing human resources and management information systems (MIS), supported by role-based reporting dashboards in Microsoft Power BI for both school heads and trust leadership.
The Outcome
The consolidated ERP environment established a single source of truth for financial performance and asset management across the entire trust. Central finance teams reduced month-end closing timelines from three weeks to five days, enabling accurate rolling cash flow forecasts and immediate visibility into department-level budget utilisation. Automated procurement workflows and centralized supplier management generated measurable purchasing efficiencies across estate maintenance and classroom provisioning. Administrative burden at the school level was significantly lowered, allowing institutional staff to refocus resources on educational delivery.
Technology used
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance
- Microsoft Power BI
- Azure Integration Services
- Azure Logic Apps
- Dataverse
- Power Automate
Replacing our fragmented legacy accounts with a unified ERP has given us total visibility across all campuses and transformed our central reporting efficiency.