What is Bromcom Budgets?
The Bromcom Budgets platform is a new take on budgeting in the Education Sector, this system has been designed to cater for all Academies, MATs and Maintained Schools. For MATs the system offers a single database for all staffing, income and expenditure and tailored user security roles to ensure the right people have the right access across your MAT, this could mean devolved budget setting at school level, total central control of budget lines or a combination of both.
Bromcom Budgets integrates with Bromcom MIS and Finance removing the need for costly duplication of data entry ensuring your teams can spend their valuable time analysing the figures and KPIs, not producing them!
Directly integrated with the Microsoft PowerBI platform, Bromcom Budgets offers unrivalled analytics to provide stakeholders with the tools they need to make informed, data driven decisions.
Key Features
- Accurate Salary Calculations including On-Costs
- Instant Consolidation
- Dynamic Integrations
- Unlimited Scenarios
Features and Benefits
| Feature | What it Does | Benefits | Challenge being satisfied |
| Income & Expenditure Budgeting | Allows users to create I&E Budgets | Custom profiles allow the user to accurately phase the budget. Single view of the data allows for simple benchmarking and comparison | Schools and Academies cannot effectively plan profiled spend within customer profiling and the ability to balance budgets according to month, term or year |
| Budget Forecasting | Generate a medium-term plan | Create unlimited future years for forecasting purposes, automatically create future year projections using Bromcom forecasting tools | Assists with automatically generating future years forecasts, without functionality to do this the user would need to spend significant time manually recreating future forecasts |
| Staff Budgeting | Calculate salary costs by person | Calculate all salary costs factoring in all contract variables, accurately calculate on-costs for employees with multiple roles. | Complex staff calculations are difficult to do by hand (or on excel) when the user needs to take into account multiple variables and external factors |
| Integrations | Two-way integrations with Bromcom MIS and Finance | Remove costly duplication of data entry and ensure consistency across systems | Significant staff time is spent copying data from MIS to Budgets, Budgets to Finance and Finance to Budgets, being integrated in with other Bromcom tools removes the need to waste time on this |
| Budget Monitoring | Compare actuals against budget lines | Automatically compare actuals with budget lines to inform reforecasting and management accounting analysis | As with the above, having to manually compare budgets to actuals or budget staffing to payroll is an enormously time consuming endeavour that can be automated thereby saving valuable staff time |
| Scenario Management | Create unlimited budget scenarios | Create what-if scenarios to test the impact of proposed changes on the future plan, allows for more dynamic regular reforecasting | Users of the platform will occupy a role that usually involves answering complex questions about the future state of the organisation. This means the user would need to manually adjust figures based on whatever proposal is being made, whereas having scenarios means that the user can create a scenario with the impact of such a proposal included to provide stakeholders with more meaningful information, quickly |
| Detailed User Security | Specify user roles and remit to ensure the right people and are completing the right tasks | Provision of any combination of access to suit business needs. Access to parts of the budget or the whole, access to multiple sites or parts within sites | Without detailed security, the senior user of the system would likely have to complete much more work him/herself because the software contains lots of sensitive data – being able to give certain people, access to only certain parts of the system means that senior users can delegate responsibility and share the burden of budgeting setting |
| Reporting and Analysis | Production of statutory reports and returns as well as custom reporting for internal use | Support the DFE Chart, Bromcom Budgets can automate stat return production whilst also offering custom reporting tools to meet the specific needs of each organisation | It can be stressful for users having to produce reports to meet statutory obligations, such information is made available to the public and making any errors can be highly embarrassing for the organisation and could ultimately lead to inaccurate grant funding or finance audits from the ESFA. Robust software producing accurate data minimises the risk of the above happening |
| Budget Virements | Allow for movement of budget amounts between areas in the approved budget | Keep a detailed record of budget virements and amendments, choose to approve them or make virements within new scenarios | School budgets are large unwieldy beasts in many cases. They can also be fed into by a number of sources, therefore having a formal process to transfer to modify budgets which is then logged provides additional assurances that the figures are accurate and stakeholders can be confident that the right people have been involved in the budget setting process |