Management Information Sheet

The Finance and Business Services Team have been working hard to make positive changes to the new budget software for the 2017/18 financial year. We have taken on our experiences and your feedback to adapt the software to better meet your needs.

Summary of Changes:

• One Staff Forecast for both Teaching and Support staff, covering all forecast years.
• Auto increments allowing for the minimum and maximum of the banded scales for Teaching and Support Staff.
• On-cost rates associated with Employer National Insurance and Pension contributions will be calculated by the software to assist with more effective monitoring (i.e. on-cost rates will no longer be chosen by the user).
• More interactive screens to support user knowledge.
• Efficiency Planning Checks supporting information which can be shared with your Governing Boards.

The changes have been included to enhance the existing offer, and we have maintained some of the functions which we know you found most useful:

• Multiple Subjectives
• Department coding
• Filter screens

We will be releasing the budget planner software on the 24th February 2017.

Due to the changes we have made we have decided to release a short E-Learning module which will support even those more experienced staff in navigating around the improved software.

Please login to the Learning Hub to access this course:

norfolk.learningpool.com

There are significant changes which we need to ensure you are fully briefed upon and the course will support this.

The transfer of staffing budgets from the previous year’s Budget Planner to the 2018 version requires a lot of data validation to be performed to produce a three forecast from the single year forecasts imported. Depending on the size of your workforce this could take some to complete.

It is our advice that users must copy prior year sheets before completing anything else in the 2018 Budget Planner. It is highly recommended you complete some house-keeping in the staffing sheets to be imported to ensure this transition is accurate as possible: all members of staff should be assigned a valid staff code (duplicates will be combined into one record), contract end dates, spinal points etc. should be checked.

For those schools purchasing the Standard Finance Support Package we cannot stress the importance of completing the housekeeping and import enough, prior to attending a pre- arranged budget workshop, this will ensure you are fully prepared to spend quality time building your new budget.

Please direct any enquiries to your Finance Support Officer if you have questions regarding the Budget Planner software.