Nestled in the Rock River Valley, the City of Oregon Illinois boasts a thriving outdoor community, and is home to over 160 acres of parks managed by the Oregon Park District. Dan Griffin, Oregon Park District's Finance and Technology Administrator, oversees the park district's finances and financial software.

Dan had a pressing problem, the company that provided his financial
software announced end-of-life for the software. He knew he needed to find a new solution and knew this was his opportunity to find a modern, hosted solution that was flexible enough to meet his districts specific needs. 

"One of my goals was to get to a hosted environment to get away from issues with onsite storage and to clean up our onsite structure. We also wanted something that fit our needs and was not going to be obsolete in 2-3 years," according to Dan. 

Dan also wanted a solution that was cost-effective for the size of his organization, that could manage all his financial management needs in one spot, and produced transparent reporting at the click of a button.

After reviewing a number of other financial software solutions, Oregon Park District made the decision to transition to the hosted version of Harris' SmartFusion suite. Dan felt that SmartFusion met his needs when it came to a financial management solution for his team. Especially in terms of flexibility and transparent reporting. According to Dan, "the biggest appeal to me was the flexibility to manage everything in one spot and essentially be able to export any piece of data I wanted, at any point in time."

As with most public sector organizations, finding the right size solution, for the right price, was another deciding factor for Dan. Knowing his needs weren't scaled to the necessities of a full-sized municipality, Dan found that ability to select which essential SmartFusion modules his organization required helped keep his cost down while still gaining access to an advanced solution. "The price point was a big part of it. And it also came down to the size of our organization. We didn't need a full ERP system, but something that was flexible and fit our size."

Transitioning to new financial software is often one of the most strenuous times for any organization. For Dan and his team, the transition to SmartFusion was a well structured process. It only took 5 ½ months for full implementation and go-live. "The implementation was one of the best parts of the transition. How smooth it really was. We were able to export the majority of all our data over to the conversion team and pretty much had zero issues. When we went live on January 8, it was all there and ready to go. It overall went very smoothly," said Dan.

Since the effortless implementation, Dan and his team have been able to use SmartFusion's enhanced transparent reporting features to maximize their productivity and cut down on unnecessary busy work. "The ability to have a lot of the reporting that I needed pre-formatted and the ability to export that directly without having to go through a whole project of creating custom reporting was a big draw for me. Having those pre-templated in SmartFusion really helped us."