Hours saved
Reduction in budget overspend
Teaching and admin staff
Shire Christian School is an independent Christian school in New South Wales with more than 950 students and around 130 to 140 staff. On any given day, roughly 1,000 people are onsite, which creates a busy school environment with many everyday purchasing needs.
As Business Manager, Peter Watters is focused on giving the board, executive team and finance team confidence that school spending is visible, approved and controlled. With Alii, Shire Christian has built a clearer workflow across purchasing, expense claims and credit card reconciliation, while keeping the process practical for staff.
Before Alii, Shire Christian faced a familiar school finance tension. Teachers and staff were often the right people to create the request because they knew what they needed, which supplier made sense and what quality or timing was required. At the same time, finance needed to know what had been ordered, who approved it and whether the right rules had been followed before payment.
Centralising every order through finance would have created bottlenecks. Decentralising without a clear workflow created risk. Orders could happen without finance having context, invoices could arrive without enough supporting information, and supplier activity could become hard to manage.
Peter described examples such as 15 different stationery suppliers, multiple bus companies and invoices arriving without context. The issue was not just admin time. It was how to keep purchasing practical for staff while giving finance visibility, control and confidence before money left the school.
"It introduced the potential for fraud because we really had no control over those things."
Peter Watters, Business Manager, Shire Christian School
Alii gave Shire Christian a way to decentralise safely. Staff can create requests because they are closest to the need, while Alii keeps the rules, approval pathways, thresholds and visibility inside the workflow.
As users enter information, Alii guides the process. It shows what needs to happen, who needs to approve and whether a transaction needs to follow a different pathway. That takes the guesswork out of approvals, coding, delegations and capital expenditure rules.
Alii also gave Shire Christian continuity through a broader systems change. The school moved from a past finance system to its current finance system underneath, while Alii remained the familiar staff-facing workflow layer. For staff, the day-to-day purchasing process stayed consistent while finance managed the complexity of the transition behind the scenes.
The biggest change for Shire Christian is the feeling of control. Finance can see more context before invoices arrive, rather than trying to reconstruct the story from a receipt, email trail or supplier follow-up. Staff can see where requests are sitting and budget owners can see spend, commitments and remaining budget earlier.
Accuracy has improved because staff code spend closer to the source. Instead of finance working backwards from a receipt, the person closest to the purchase provides the context as part of the workflow. That reduces rework, back-and-forth and corrections for finance to chase later.
The same control model now reaches beyond purchase orders. Expense claims can move through approval and into AP for reimbursement, while credit card transactions are reconciled with receipts, ownership and approvals in Alii. For Peter, the value is that spend can take different pathways, but finance still has visibility and control in one ecosystem.
"It means we could decentralise. We put ordering in the hands of the people that knew best what they need and it enforces the rules."
Peter Watters, Business Manager, Shire Christian School
The following results are from Alii 2026 usage reporting.
By automating nearly 1,000 transactions through Alii in 2026, Shire Christian is estimated to have saved more than 185 hours, equal to more than 23 working days of admin time.
Alii helped reduce exposure to financial loss and unauthorised transactions by intercepting potential payment fraud risks automatically.
Duplicate invoices were stopped before processing, reducing financial risk and manual reconciliation work.
On-time payment performance exceeded 82 percent, supporting stronger vendor relationships and smoother operations.
The finance team is projected to save 1.7 hours every working day through automated AP workflows in 2026.
Staff save around 15 to 20 minutes each time they raise a purchase order because the process is simpler and easier to follow.
Credit card reconciliation saves at least 2 to 3 days each month, with receipts, transactions and approvals captured in the workflow.
Audit preparation is estimated to save 2 to 3 weeks because the approval trail exists in Alii as the work happens.
Real-time budget visibility has helped reduce budget overspend by 90 percent, because issues can be picked up when requests are raised rather than after month end.
Shire Christian’s workflow story is strongest when purchasing, expense claims and credit cards are shown together. Each pathway supports a different kind of school spend, but each needs the same fundamentals: context, coding, approval, visibility and evidence.
The preferred path is a purchase order where possible. Staff create the request, Alii guides the approval path and finance can see what has happened before payment.
Expense claims provide a structured fallback when account purchasing does not fit.
Credit card reconciliation gives finance visibility over card spend without the month-end scramble of collecting paper receipts and assembling statements manually.
Together, these workflows give Shire Christian a more consistent spend-control model. Staff can act without turning finance into the ordering desk, and finance can see the trail before payment or reconciliation.
Shire Christian’s story is useful for schools that want to give staff more ownership without losing finance control. The case for Alii is not simply that it makes a process faster. The deeper value is that it puts rules, visibility and audit evidence into the workflow people are already using.
It also shows why a workflow layer matters when schools change systems underneath. Alii helped Shire Christian protect staff from much of the disruption of a finance system transition, while giving finance a clearer process for purchasing, claims, card spend and approvals.
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