Challenge
We set about helping a MAT (multi academy trust) who recently approached Tucasi. They were looking to solve the following issues with their administrative processes:
The MAT regularly required data from each individual school within their trust. However, their current system made this a laborious task for their increasingly busy administrative staff. To attain the data, each school had to run an appropriate report and email the data back to the MAT. The MAT then collated it before manually entering the data into their third party finance system.
Ad-hoc reporting by the MAT was also a challenge. If they required data for slightly different dates or other cost centres, they had to request this from the school. The school would have to re-run the report with the new parameters and then send another email. Consequently, nothing was in real-time and they were also dependent on school staff being available to respond to queries.
Helping a MAT to improve efficiency
To overcome these challenges and improve efficiency across their trust, Tucasi implemented a cloud-based solution.
Firstly, Tucasi gave the MAT direct access to each individual school from a central base. This allowed them to run reports as and when they required. Importantly, this reduced response time and the burden on administrative staff.
Secondly, to remove the manual process of collating data from across the schools, we introduced our Central Reporting Tool.
This gave the MAT information via a single log-in, which connected them with data from each of their schools.
As a result, the MAT could easily add to reports over time to suit individual needs. The MAT was able to analyse data for individual sites, or run in ‘all sites’ mode to present collated data.
In addition, the Central Reporting Tool gave the MAT the ability to run financial summary reports to analyse all recorded income and expenditure, as well as a dedicated Online Payments Report to assist with bank reconciliation of direct online payment credits for online purchases.
And finally, the MAT asked Tucasi if it was possible to produce an output that they could upload to their finance system, to remove the final manual process. With this in mind, they sent us the field headings that their finance system used. Based on this, we added a new ‘output style’ to our Finance Summary Report. This gave a data-sheet style rather than a ‘pretty’ print-ready format that they would need to edit before uploading. As a result, the MAT no longer had to export the ‘pretty’ version to CSV and then remove page numbers, titles, groupings, formatting etc. At the press of a button, they could export data to a CSV file which is ready to upload immediately.
The results
Feedback from the MAT at the time and subsequently was exceptionally positive. The solution implemented by Tucasi successfully addressed their administrative challenges, helping them save a significant amount of time. Going forward, the MAT now has the ability to access and analyse data from across their trust accurately.
