We are delighted to be able to bring this key functionality to Access Education Budgets, helping our customers to respond to external drivers such as the current economic climate that are having a critical impact on their budgets and constraining expenditure across the board.
New to Access Education? Here’s some context
For those who are new to Access Education, let's take a moment to understand how budget planning and monitoring typically unfold within schools or trusts.
As a school or trust, the process begins with planning budgets for the upcoming school year. Tools like Access Education Budgets are instrumental in this phase, helping you and your stakeholders build out budget plans and explore different scenarios until reaching an agreed-upon budget within the organisation, such as the trust.
Throughout the year, as actual income and expenditure come into play, the budget is a vital tool for understanding the school's financial position. This is where adjustments become crucial—using actuals as a guide to identify areas where the original budget might fall short or where underspending presents opportunities for redistribution.
The ability to adjust budgets allows for ongoing comparison between the original budget and its evolving iterations. This continual monitoring ensures alignment with the agreed budget and serves as valuable input for the next budget-setting cycle.
The evolution of our snapshot functionality
The snapshots feature in our product offers a powerful tool for budget monitoring. It allows users to capture a snapshot of financial actuals at a specific point in time and compare them with the original and current budget figures. These are also presented in the snapshot as at the point in time, for a full 'side by side' comparison with each other, and the actuals.
Users can easily identify variances between the original and current budget, view the percentage of the budget spent, assess remaining budget for the year, and project the expected outturn based on actuals and remaining budget values.
This functionality equips schools with valuable insights to evaluate their financial position and make informed decisions about resource allocation as the year progresses.
Previously, however, the snapshot view was limited to static reports of actuals, budgets, and projections. Users could only view and export these figures, requiring manual analysis and adjustments outside the system. This disjointed process was time-consuming and inefficient.
But now, with the introduction of Budget Adjustments on Budget Monitoring Snapshots, the landscape has changed. Users can seamlessly analyse, adjust, and update budgets directly within the snapshot view, streamlining the entire process and saving valuable time and effort.
Let’s take a further look into this feature.
New budget adjustments: What is it?
This new feature within Education Budgets empowers users to make adjustments directly on the budget scenario from the Snapshot view in Budget Monitoring. It streamlines the process by allowing users to monitor progress on the budget throughout the year and make adjustments based on expected outcomes, end-of-year projections, and variances, all from a single, convenient view.
Users can easily view the budgeted values for all budget lines and input adjustment values where necessary, saving time and effort in manual data analysis and entry.
How does it benefit you, the customer?
The introduction of Budget Adjustments significantly enhances the budget management experience for our customers. Previously, users had to analyse data in the Snapshot, export it, decide on adjustments, and then manually update budget lines in the scenario.
This cumbersome process has now been simplified, eliminating the need to analyse adjustments to your budget position outside of the budgeting software and reducing the time it takes to make informed budget adjustments. By enabling users to analyse and adjust budgets seamlessly within the application, we are facilitating quicker decision-making, saving time, and improving the quality of data available for reporting to stakeholders.
Which customers can benefit from this new functionality?
This new feature is available to all users of Education Budgets, including LA-maintained schools, academies, and other educational institutions, such as independent schools. Customers simply need to enable the Snapshots functionality to start leveraging the benefits of Budget Adjustments.
Whether you're a small school or a large academy trust, this feature is designed to enhance your budget management capabilities.
What else is planned for development?
In our commitment to continuously improve user experience, we have additional enhancements planned for Budget Monitoring Snapshots. These include the ability to enter notes with budget adjustments, display new budget and variance values before saving, and improve scenario comparison functionality.
These updates are slated for due for release at the end of March 2024, further enhancing the usability and effectiveness of our budget management tools.
Conclusion: A significant step forward
Budget Monitoring Snapshots – Budget Adjustments represent a significant step forward in empowering educational institutions with robust budget management capabilities. By streamlining the process of budget analysis and adjustment, we are enabling our customers to make more informed decisions, save valuable time, and ultimately, improve financial outcomes for their institutions.
We're committed to continuing to innovate and support our customers in their mission to deliver quality education effectively and efficiently. To learn more, watch our 9 minute demo or enquire about pricing.
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