Riverina Water County Council

Riverina Water County Council engaged APV Valuers and Asset Management (APV) to do external valuations on its infrastructure and land and building assets for its 2011 financial statements.

Having never had valuations completed before, the Council required APV to start from scratch in constructing the valuations.

Michele Curran, Council’s Finance & Administration Manager said the result was APV going above and beyond what they were originally engaged for.

“Originally it was anticipated that the information we could provide would be more substantial,” Michele said. “But in the end, APV had to do a lot more work than was originally predicted.

“They really went above and beyond what they were engaged for and as a result we gained better quality information.

Michele said APV did all land and building valuations and they also valued above ground water infrastructure assets.

She said the water infrastructure asset valuations in particular are very specialised.

“There aren’t many companies that can complete water asset valuations. When looking at valuers, we found that APV had done a lot of valuations for other Councils and water authorities. This specialised knowledge is hard to find,” she said.

The work done by APV also went well beyond just figures, with their work forming the basis of creating a new asset management system.

“They’ve provided detailed valuations spreadsheets for us which has given us a good database of our assets,” Michele said.  “All assets are broken down and photographed. This detailed asset record can now be used when we introduce an asset management system.

“This would have been difficult to do before APV’s valuations, as we just didn’t have complete enough information,” she said.

APV also hosted an asset management workshop for the Council to bring together key players and to provide an understanding of asset management ahead of Council creating its asset management system.

“The workshop explained asset management from a business, accounting and engineering perspective so all of our key players had the same understanding prior to commencing the process of implementing an asset management system. This was a valuable part of our process,” Michele said.

Michele said APV completed their work quickly and on time and were good to deal with.

“They were very easy to deal with, professional and have a good knowledge of local government, which was an important factor from our perspective,” she said.

“APV had a short timeframe to provide information for us to prepare our financial statements at the end of the financial year, but they did the work quickly and got it to us in a timely manner.

“And their work was in a format, with enough substantiation to satisfy the auditors regarding what was included in Council’s financial statements.

“I would highly recommend them to other Councils and water authorities” she said.