The Background
Robert Clack School of Science is a secondary school in The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. It has 12 form entry currently and will be moving to 18 form entry in September 2020. In 2021 it will also be adding a 3 form primary school. It has over 2000 pupils on roll and an annual budget of £13.8m. The school operates over 3 sites.
The Solution
The school runs 3 instances of RM Finance, to reflect the 3 different areas of the school ‘business’ that have to be managed, including the leisure centre which is run as a commercial enterprise. Each finance system is managed autonomously but is easy for users, such as Emily Lines, School Business Manager, to switch between the different instances.
The school moved to RM Finance in 2016, and since then have migrated to the new cloud-based version of the system. Migration and setting up the system was really easy.
The new sales invoicing functionality in RM Finance is proving very useful for invoicing for revenue generation. Previously invoices would have been raised manually and if any adjustments were required they had to be done manually which meant duplication of effort.
The Benefits
RM Finance provides good visibility of spend against budget and Emily can drill down for a very detailed analysis of spending, she says ‘I can find everything I need’. Reporting is also easy to navigate, particularly for the monthly run required for Heads of Department to help them track their spending. The school chooses to manage their payments by BACS rather than cheques and this has helped simplify the process of bank statement reconciliation.
Training requirements have been minimal because RM Finance is quite intuitive and user friendly. As Emily says, ‘you can work out yourself how to do most tasks.’ When additional training and support is required the webinars have proved useful. The logical, methodical structure of the system helps make it easy to use. Emily enjoys working with RM Education to identify developments and improvements for the system.
"RM Finance is a really useful system, great for the size of our school. I know exactly where I am financially – what’s owed, what’s spent – and I can drill down to the last penny. I really appreciate the autonomy the system gives me to monitor the school’s spending and manage our finances."
Emily Lines, School Business Manager
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