For brilliant-but-busy multi-academy trusts, efficient budgeting, forecasting, and reporting saves stress and resources. Imagine all your schools’ budget data at your fingertips, accessible in one central location.
If you have experienced a new system implementation, it probably went something like this:
- You were asked to fill out a bunch of Excel templates that you didn’t understand, to populate a system that you don’t yet know how to use.
- This approach may have enabled a quick build, but once the system was in place you found yourselves putting in extra work to fix various issues as your understanding of the system increased.
This isn’t the way we work.
Our team have been implementing financial systems for MATs for many years, and we’re keen to craft a great end result from the outset. This means asking ourselves how we can give our users the best possible start with their new IMP system.
So, how do we do it?
We’ll ask for your best data – whatever its form – and build our own templates, ensuring that all of the corrective work is done at the beginning. This will likely include a combination of your current budget data, payroll data, and your all-important excel workings.
We don’t just whack your data into one-size-fits-all templates. We will first review it, then combine and standardise it, ensuring that all inconsistencies are dealt with. This process is far from what you’d normally expect and provides as much a budget review as a system build.
Here’s how we’ve successfully completed 195 implementations in just 3 years – and what other trusts think of the process:
IMP do the legwork
We understand that you don’t have idle resource waiting to put work into a system migration.
So, we won’t drown you in Excel templates or expect you to provide us with your data in unachievable timeframes. And, after the project planning meeting, we aim to do the bulk of the legwork for you.
After our initial request for your budget data, we’ll only request from you further data that is either unextractable, unavailable, or where queries remain. We’ll also ask for your funding statements as they are used to automatically calculate income.
“The IMP team asked us to send them the information we had, in whatever format, however scrappy, and they came back to us with a system fully loaded with budgets that the Board had authorised. They also identified areas of focus for revising too, based on what had come out of inputting the data.”
“We have data from different places – four local authorities with different funding formulas, pension schemes, and a primary-based special school – and by pulling all this together in one place you can see at a glance what is going on across the trust and can make informed decisions.”
— Leanda, Maritime Academy Trust
Helpfulness
We understand that you work in a busy environment and are likely to be juggling multiple projects at any one time. So, we’ll always fit the project around you.
You’ll be able to select the project sessions that work for your team – including planning, implementation, and training – allowing you to tailor your IMP Planner experience. One of the great things about budgeting software is that it doesn’t need to go live on a fixed date, so we can give you the flexibility to work around your other priorities.
“During the initial phase transferring data from our old systems to IMP Planner, the team members just completely understood how MATs and schools work and that was due to their sector backgrounds. They got to know the trust, and me, and were really flexible on timescales for implementation. If something came up elsewhere that I had to deal with, they were totally accommodating. We had a Teams platform set up and they would drop things in, which I would review and return, so it was a seamless transfer.”
“The IMP team’s knowledge of their own system really stood out. That may sound basic, but in my experience not everyone has that.”
— Ryan, Prince Regent Street Trust.
Customer-led approach
We offer a completely flexible approach to training and support. This ensures that your team is comfortable with the system from day one – and that your knowledge continues to evolve after you go live with IMP.
We’ll do our best to accommodate your requirements, as well as offering tailored training and support sessions when you need it most. You can have as many training sessions as you like, both at trust and school level, either delivered by our experts in person or using our on-demand library of guides on IMP Help.
“The patience shown by IMP [during implementation] was amazing.”
“The training has been fantastic: delivered in bite-sized weekly chunks, covering a specific topic each week. It is totally responsive to our needs and there is no limit to how much training you can have.”
— Rachel, St. Christopher’s Multi-Academy Trust
Simplicity and accuracy
We will work with you to create an accurate, easy-to-maintain budget and forecast using the full functionality of IMP Planner. And we won’t just disappear once you’re live. After your implementation, you’ll move into our refinement process to help you learn all about your new system.
“The support from the very beginning was absolutely fantastic. We used to have to do separate Excel budget sheets, including complicated, time-consuming and at risk of human error staffing budgets. Now, IMP is the backbone.”
— Graham, Cornerstone Academy Trust
So, there you have it. If you have any questions at all about our implementation process, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
For more information, just register for one of our free introductory webinars here.
