Update on Purchasing Cards and Portal
Dear IBN Community,
On the 1st of July 2022, IBN released the Community Programs (CP) for the 2022/23 financial year, which you can read about here.
The theme of this years Community Programs were based around the following principles:
- Increase benefits
- Give members more flexibility and choice
- Make claiming far quicker
- More support for Elders (Increase the access to Health assistance)
- Easier access to members money
While we believe that we are achieving the above principles, we also acknowledge that we have some work to do regarding reducing the number of processing days for CP applications.
Due to some recent unforeseen circumstances, we had fallen behind in the timely processing of CP applications.
The unforeseen circumstances have included several of our staff falling ill with COVID and other winter-based illnesses, combined with our T.O staff needing time away to fulfill their community obligations (such as attending community meetings). This is not an excuse, but an apology for why we had fallen a bit behind recently.
Our staff work very hard to keep up with the CP application demand, and we are now up to date with our processing times.
Portal Update
We have expanded on the way that members can apply for their programs, by introducing online forms on our website, and this has been popular to date, with over 700 online forms having been received for CP support in the first 21 days of its deployment.
This was our first step in our journey of eventually introducing the member portal.
Following are the phases and progress of the Member Portal Project:
We are currently finalising the Request for Proposal phase and will be moving to the implementation phase fairly soon.
We are working on this as hard as we can (with our aim being on having a detailed update ready to present at this year’s Annual General Meeting)
Purchasing Cards Update
In recent communications, and at the Extraordinary General Meeting in June of this year, we advised members of our objective of introducing Purchasing Cards for our Household Essentials Program, as a means of achieving our principle of easier access to your money.
Following are the phases and progress of the Purchasing Cards project:
We are currently finalising the feasibility study phase and will be moving to the solution selection phase fairly soon.
We have experienced one delay about Goods and Services Tax.
We are working as hard as we can to have this ready as soon as possible (with our aim being having the Purchasing Cards ready to present at this year’s Annual General Meeting)
We hope that this communication gives a good update on where we are at with our CP applications and our principles on member support and provides some details on some of the items that have hindered our progress.
We thank you for the patience and for your understanding while we continue to progress through these works.