From Single Sales to Strategic Partnership: How UNSW Uses Guroo Academy's B2B Purchasing Capability

Summary

UNSW has been using Guroo Academy to manage short course purchasing across several of its faculties, with AGSM at UNSW Business School among the first to put the platform to work at scale. To help UNSW sell at an organisational level, Guroo Academy introduced a new B2B purchasing capability, now available to all Guroo Academy clients. UNSW can build multiseat, multi-course orders, offer flexible payment options, and manage the full financial lifecycle from invoice to credit note. This has resulted in smoother operations and a new way to partner with organisational customers, right across the university.

The opportunity

AGSM at UNSW Business School was already using Guroo Academy (branded as UNSW Navigator) to manage individual course purchases, and wanted to go further, using the platform to sell at an organisational level too.

Customers could buy seats for their team, but there was no way to combine multiple courses into one order, and sales staff had no way to build a multiseat order across multiple courses in a single transaction. Larger, more complex deals often meant manually editing invoices to make them work. Pay-later options by credit card could also result in unpaid invoices that needed a clear process to follow up.

The solution

Previously, customers could self-enrol in individual courses online, but larger, multi-course deals had to be managed manually by the sales team.

Guroo Academy’s B2B purchasing capability improves the experience for both the customer and the UNSW team. For self-service, customers can now build their own multiseat, multi-course orders directly online, without needing to go through sales. For sales-led deals, sales teams can build an order on a customer’s behalf as a quote or proposal, with an invoice generated automatically once the proposal has been accepted.

The solution also introduced:

• Flexible payment options – pay now by credit card, pay later by invoice (card or EFT), or draw down from a credit on hold balance
• An order management workspace for sales teams to create, save, and review draft orders before they’re confirmed, reducing the number of orders that need to be voided due to error
• A structured financial framework covering billing entities, purchase plans, and purchase terms, so each UNSW faculty can apply the right pricing, eligibility, and conditions to different audiences and programs
• A formal credit note and refund process to handle withdrawals, transfers, substitutions, and cancellations consistently

As Tracey Flynn, Director of Executive Education at AGSM, noted, the implementation wasn’t without its challenges given the number of legacy systems and stakeholders on UNSW’s side. Even so, the university’s IT team singled out the experience of working with the Guroo team as one of the best they’d had, describing the team as responsive and focused on what needed to be done.

The results

The impact has been felt on both sides of the transaction.

For finance teams, day-to-day work is simply faster. Invoicing, revenue reconciliation, and transfers all happen more quickly than before, freeing up time that used to go into administrative back-and-forth.

It’s really helped my team improve their finance structure. Now that they can populate invoices, they can get those sent off to customers really quickly, they can reconcile revenue really easily, they can transfer people a lot more quickly than what they did before.

Tracey Flynn, Director of Executive Education, AGSM at UNSW Business School

But the bigger shift has been strategic. Being able to accept bulk payments means UNSW faculties like AGSM can now sell to an entire organisation in a single transaction, rather than working through one individual sale at a time or manually building proposals.

Rather than selling to an individual, we can now sell to an organisation, and that is a real benefit from a revenue generation perspective.

Tracey Flynn, Director of Executive Education, AGSM at UNSW Business School

This has also opened the door to a partnering model, where an organisation can connect with a UNSW faculty once and access its whole portfolio of programs through a single relationship.

That then puts us in a very strong position with that customer. We become one of their strategic partners, rather than just a supplier of one individual program.

Tracey Flynn, Director of Executive Education, AGSM at UNSW Business School

For teams like AGSM’s, the change goes beyond process efficiency. With less time spent on admin, staff can focus more on the customer and the learner, rather than managing invoices and payments from behind the scenes.

What this means for other organisations

UNSW’s experience shows what’s possible when a purchasing system is built to support organisational buying, not just individual transactions. For universities and training providers weighing up a similar partnering model, UNSW’s approach demonstrates a clear path: less time on admin, larger and simpler deals, and a stronger, more strategic relationship with organisational customers.

Watch the full case study video: https://youtu.be/yNpXMn0F8GE