Greentree’s GAME ON competition has come to a close and the Kimberley Accommodation Group are the lucky winners. The competition called on organisations to pitch for the opportunity to acquire the latest in all-embracing management software designed specifically for the challenges they face.

Greentree received dozens of qualified entries the competition and will now award up to $250,000’s worth of business management systems software, related services, cloud hosting and implementation hand-holding – FREE – to the Kimberley Accommodation Group for putting up the most persuasive case.

Kimberley Accommodation helps ensure that the thousands of tourists who flock to Western Australia from May till August are bedded down, fed and watered. However, managing a business whose facilities are separated by hundreds of kilometres and is owned by a complex structure of family trusts, and which has significant downtime during the wet season, is no picnic – especially with antiquated accounting systems.

“I was told we’d won GAME ON as I was heading into a board meeting to present our quarterly financial results,” Garry Herbert, Kimberley Accommodation’s chief financial officer  says. “That report took me over 40 man-hours to produce. With Greentree I’ll be able to run that consolidated report straight from the system at the push of a button – that’s a week a month given back to me, straight away.”

Dannielle Hart, their chief operating officer added, “I’m well aware of the limitations of our accounting system. We don’t have that ability to analyse the business as we should, and we struggle to get the information that the bank wants in a timely fashion. It’s just super-exciting that we won’t have those sorts of problems going forward, and we’ll be able to know exactly where we’re at and plan for the future.”

Competition entrants were required to describe their business pain points, the day-to-day problems their business confronts, and their growth plans that are frustrated by systems that are no longer adequate and the winner was decided by a panel of judges and public votes.

“Running GAME ON has been a joy because it gave us the opportunity to connect with real Aussie businesses that are inspiring in what they’re trying to achieve,” says Greentree’s CEO, Peter Dickinson. “Kimberley Accommodation is a fantastic example of the mid-sized companies that are the heart of Australian business.”

Mark Nilsen, one of the judges added, “They proved to me that they could actually use the software, and understood what it could do for them. I thought that if they won, they’d get the most out of it, but also their presentation was clearly able to capture the imagination of the voting public. So they appealed to the technical people like me, and to the non-technical people who were looking for something visual with a bit of humour.”

The other finalists in the competition included Asthma Foundation, Caesars, Central Diesel, Cymax, GMW Group, Hydro International, Mecrus Group, Newcastle Airport and Southern Cross Oil.

Meanwhile, Christchurch bathroom manufacturer and importer Smail & Co was announced as the New Zealand winner of the Greentree competition.

Greentree is a New Zealand software developer whose business software is used by medium-sized organisations internationally. Users include Griffiths Equipment, Paramount Services and Ryman Healthcare in New Zealand, Southern Cross Healthcare and Incat in Australia and the Publishers Association and UK Highways in the United Kingdom.