Challenge

The MAT recently approached Tucasi to help solve the following issues with their administrative processes:

The MAT regularly required data from each individual school within their trust, but their current system made this a laborious task for their increasingly busy administrative staff.  In order to gain the data, each school had to run an appropriate report and email the data back to the MAT, where it was then collated before being manually entered into their third party finance system.

Ad-hoc reporting by the MAT was also a challenge.  If they decided they required a slightly different date range or data to cover different cost centres etc. they would have to go back to the school and request the report be re-run with the new parameters and another email would have to be sent.  Consequently, nothing was in real-time and they were also dependent on school staff being available to respond to queries.

Solution

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 where they could run reports as and when they required. This importantly reduced response time and the burden on administrative staff.

Secondly, in order 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, reports could easily be added to over time to suit individual needs. The MAT was also able to analyse data for an individual site, 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 could be used to upload to their finance system to remove the final manual process. With this in mind, they sent us the field headings that were used by their finance system. Based on this, we added a new 'output style' to our Finance Summary Report, giving a data-sheet style rather than a 'pretty' print-ready format that would need to be edited. 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, the MAT was able to export this data-sheet to a CSV file which is immediately ready to upload.

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.