Customer Story: St Bartholomew's CE
Implementing a fully centralised finance strategy with Access Education Finance & Budgets
St Bartholomew’s CE Multi Academy Trust is made up of 7 primary academies and their responsibility is to ensure that all children enjoy themselves and excel in their studies. They believe that, by working in partnership, they can utilise the strengths of all schools in the alliance, to inspire children and push the boundaries of what is possible.
Since becoming Director of finance and operations at the rapidly expanding St Bartholomew’s CE Multi-Academy Trust, Christopher Dryer has been focused on the aim of implementing a fully centralised finance strategy.
Access Education Finance
Access Education Budgets
Multi-Academy Trust
Here, Christopher explains some of the main benefits of the Access Finance and Budgeting software and how it’s helping achieve these aims.
Having transitioned from a maintained school to a multi-academy trust back in 2016, we knew we needed a system that was intuitive and simple to use to help our team get to grips with new processes and ways of working. Since then...
...the team at Access has continued to exceed our expectations, remained competitive on price and invested in countless improvements and product upgrades.
As well as the regular improvements made by Access, the team are constantly praising the system’s ease of functionality which allows us to work as efficiently as possible. Of course, the process of onboarding new schools creates a significant amount of administrative work, so it was essential we chose a system that allowed us to streamline as many of these processes as possible. Via the system we can import and export large amounts of data from Excel, helping to generate spreadsheets, new datasets and gain better oversight of how the trust is running. Unlike other systems, the Access software allows us to do this in just a few clicks. Not only does this save time, it also ensures staff can complete crucial analysis and undertake more thorough planning.
The centralised functions have helped streamline many of the time-consuming tasks that were previously undertaken by each individual school...
...such as updating user profiles, adding new leisure codes or supplier details. The ability to do this via the central system has saved us the equivalent of a day a month in staff time.
The cloud-based functionality has allowed the team to continue working as normal throughout lockdowns, as well as supporting our strategy of moving to a single bank account, single BACS payments and single points of control across the trust. Looking ahead, we plan to link our accounts with DfE returns which will further automate our processes and further centralise the department.
As we grow, relying on individual schools to undertake critical processes in a coordinated manner is simply unrealistic and drains time that could be better spent supporting teachers and pupils.