DeGroote MBA Students Rise to City’s Accounting Challenge

For three years, the City of Hamilton (COH) encountered numerous challenges with its budgeting software. Staff members were spending valuable time manipulating data, and inefficient manual processes required automation. To help resolve some of the concerns, COH turned to the expertise of the DeGroote School of Business.

MBA students in the elective Accounting for Decision Makers course, which introduces learners to financial and managerial accounting, stepped in. Their task? To assess the effectiveness of COH’s current budgeting software and explore potential alternatives.

“I had just finished teaching the chapter on budgeting, and now, here it was in real life,” says assistant professor Aadil Merali of the project. “It was perfect timing. Students worked very, very hard on this. The students faced challenges, but there was real collaboration and cohesiveness between the client, me, and the students.”

The Partnership and Task

Maja Walters is the City of Hamilton’s manager of finance and administration and a DeGroote alumna. When COH began looking for solutions to its budgeting software issue, she recalled a project she worked on as a Bachelor of Commerce student. The memory of how valuable it was to understand a real business’s challenge through experiential learning prompted Walters to connect with DeGroote.

“That project allowed us to apply everything we were learning in a more interactive way, and it gave me a sense that I was contributing to and helping a business,” she says.

The COH wanted to automate reporting and make data-driven decisions, so Walters asked students to determine solutions within its existing software and explore alternatives. The City hoped the solution would result in more effective budgeting software and give its staff the ability to make strategic recommendations rather than spending their time creating reports.

The Approach and the Challenges 

Merali, also the Director of Graduate Diploma in Professional Accountancy, split his class of 14 into two groups. Group 1 investigated COH’s current budgeting software and how two other local cities use the same software. Group 2 evaluated other Canadian and U.S. municipalities’ budgeting software to establish how alternate options compared in terms of cost and functionality.

Ryan Dube was part of Group 1, and Ajay Krishnan was part of Group 2. Both students say the project brought their class content to life and enhanced their professional development.

“I had this idea that accounting was always quantitative, so I was expecting to do a lot of spreadsheets, numbers, and calculations,” says Dube. “But a lot of the recommendations we provided were qualitative, which really opened my perspective on what may provide value to others. It was a shift in mindset.”

While students banded together to deliver a solution, the project wasn’t without its challenges. Group 1, for example, encountered initial difficulty getting the two local municipalities that use the same software as COH to engage due to authentication concerns. After weeks of no movement, Walters stepped in, and the group received the needed answers.

“Examining how others were using the software helped us identify ways for COH to make better use of what they already had simply by changing their approach,” says Dube.

The Solution and Beyond 

After 12 weeks of work, the students presented their findings in an informal round-table discussion with COH. Both groups determined that COH’s current software best suited its purposes and could be more functional with some adjustments.

“We were aiming to arm COH with the best assessment we could in the timeframe we had,” says Krishnan. “Whatever they do with it, we feel proud that they’re making better decisions because of our work.”

Group 1 offered COH two critical insights. First, the software is customized for specific municipalities. Because another Canadian city first implemented it, when the federal government disseminated the software to other municipalities, it was set to the first city’s specifications and had to be adapted. Secondly, users could substitute the software’s challenging report builder with a more robust reporting platform.

Group 2, meanwhile, compared the pros and cons of other software and found that alternative options were inferior to COH’s current software.

“Students gave Maja very tangible ways to start using the software properly,” says Merali. “For example, they advised more collaboration between IT and finance at COH because IT knows a lot about the software, and finance knows a lot about accounting. So, students advised that people from Maja’s department should get training from IT and become super users.”

To unify procedures, students also formed a subcommittee tasked with creating standard operating processes for inputting data into the software but relying on another program for efficiently building reports.

Not only was COH impressed with the students’ solution to its budgeting software issue, but by working with DeGroote, Walters told Merali’s class the partnership likely saved the City $50,000 in consulting fees.

What started as an experiential learning opportunity for students and a solution-finding process for the frustrated municipality has also resulted in the exciting potential for a continued partnership.

“Maja told me that if this is the quality of DeGroote students, the City will channel all relevant projects through us,” Merali says.

Merali and Walters are continuing to collaborate on projects that allow advanced managerial accounting students to contribute to COH’s finance department. For example, one upcoming project will task the class with helping to solve a discretionary budget issue in numerous Hamilton wards. Another, meanwhile, will involve students identifying the benefits of an accommodation tax the City collects from hotels.