New Budget Planning Software

Dear Headteacher

Although many schools are successfully setting budgets using the new budget planning software, I am aware that there have been some glitches in the system.  If your school has been affected by this, I sincerely apologise and can reassure you that I am working with the software company to ensure that these issues are resolved as quickly as possible.

Last year it was recognised that our Financial Planning Tool was not robust enough to manage the complexities of school budgets and that Schools Financial Services could no longer produce a tool by ourselves.  The Financial Planning Tool was recalled many times last year and some schools had ongoing issues.  It was decided that if we continued to support schools by offering a budget planning tool we would need to go to the marketplace for one that was already being used in schools and local authorities around the country.  Ideally we would have liked to have commissioned a financial planning tool based on our previous excel tool but this was too expensive.  We always understood that by purchasing a 'ready-made' tool there would be differences and compromises the local authority and schools would have to come to terms with.

The KCC procurement process was followed and the specification for the budget planning tool went out to EU tender.  This took longer than we were initially advised and due to this the Schools Funding Forum agreed in November 2014 that schools could delay their budget submission until the 26th June 2015 as a one off exception.  This would allow the extra time for training and to produce a complete budget using a new piece of software. 

The issues experienced with the software were not foreseeable by Schools Financial Services or the software provider.  Kent is unique in that few schools use mainstream pay scales.  Our options were to ask schools to input an exact 'spot' salary for each member of staff or try to accommodate most schools by entering their pay scales for them.  Also, by trying to support schools we arranged with the software provider to upload individual school's funding to the BPS instead of each school inputting it from the templates on Kelsi.  Unfortunately, making these decisions, which were meant to be helpful to schools, inadvertently created knock on issues for some schools.

Schools Financial Services are currently experiencing a large volume of calls, mainly to work through the guidance with the bursars, which is being managed to ensure all schools receive the support they require.   We have endeavoured to communicate any issues and resolutions via the Budget Planning Software and by e mailing direct to those who attended the training, so that your bursars were kept up to date.

I do appreciate that training on the new software and in some cases dealing with issues with the software has created additional workload for your bursars; however I am confident that going forward this is a going to be a better and more robust way of budgeting in schools.  Up to five year budget forecasts will be available, ability to easily create different budgeting scenarios especially for schools facing financial difficulties, the provision for a large variety of reports and the ongoing monitoring resulting in much less budget preparation in future years. 

Please remember that schools still have until the 26^th June to submit their budgets to SFS, so hopefully by delaying the Governors meetings as requested, this will provide the bursars and yourselves enough time to set a robust budget for approval.  

If you are still experiencing any problems with the software or you would like any support  please do not hesitate to contact Schools Financial Services on 03000 415 415 or e mail schoolsfinancialservices@kent.gov.uk

Yvonne King
Schools Financial Services Manager