The United Church Schools Trust (UCST), formerly the Church Schools Company, was founded as an educational charity in 1883 with the principal objective of creating schools offering a good academic education based on Christian principles. UCST currently owns and manages eleven schools across the country, with 7000 pupils from pre-school age to Sixth Form, including Hull Collegiate School, Sunderland High School, Lincoln Minster and Guildford High School. The schools achieve above-average pass rates at GCSE and A level and over 90% of Sixth Formers go to university. UCST employs in the region of 1200 people, of whom 650 are teachers.
In addition to its Church Schools in 2003 UCST also began a programme of opening schools in disadvantaged areas as part of the Government's City Academy programme, and now has 9 Academies in locations including Salford, Northampton, Walthamstow and Sheffield, with four more due to open between 2007-9.
Since 1990 the financial strength of the group has grown considerably to enable significant re-investment in buildings, facilities and ICT. Over the last 10 years investment has been in excess of £50,000,000.
The UCST implemented PS Financials in 2005. James Nicolson, Finance Director - UCST Group, recalls:
"We looked at features of four different systems before deciding to go with PS Financials", says James.
"We chose PS Financials for its flexibility in what it allows us to do and its ability to allow us to change our processes as our changing needs dictate: for example, we can drill down to an invoice from group accounts, from different academies and companies to individual invoices."
The advantages of PS Financials' flexibility for academic users are especially evident when UCST needs to produce reports on the financial performance of its different departments and Academies. Notes James:
"Not only will PS Financials let us drill down to produce monthly management figures, covering, for example, all of our Academies, all our art departments and all teaching faculties, we can compare the finances of different departments and Academies with each other by manipulating data, on demand, in a user-friendly way. There is also a great time saving, as this kind of analysis used to take days with the previous system."
James continues:
"PS Financials also helps with day-to-day tasks, we now have one purchase ledger for all our independent schools where we used to have separate ledgers, one for each school. This has saved a great deal of administrative time by not having to replicate each run across all schools, and if we've got a supplier across all schools, we can make just one payment to them. Similar things are happening with the academies in terms of streamlining what we do."
Some of the existing data was brought across from the old system but UCST found little user training was needed on the PS Financials system:
"As part of our monthly routine we went to see all the Academies, helping them on a needs basis, but we only needed two days of training in total," recalls James.
Over 40 Finance staff are now using the system, and with the implementation of purchase order processing individual budget holders can access information on demand.
"We process VAT returns using PS Financials, which as we have charitable status is quite complicated with partial exemptions that we need to assess whether we can reclaim or not. Setting up rules in the PS Financials system cuts down the time it takes to do this from about a week to just a day."
The PS Financials system has the particular advantage of being able to adapt to the specific time frames that Academies work to, allowing users to produce reports based on the academic year or terms rather than on a monthly basis.
"With school budgets it doesn't matter when in the year money is spent, and PS Financials is flexible enough to handle this", comments James. "As part of the academy programme we have to report on new building projects, being able to report over year end for projects like this is good news as previously we had to add the financial records for different financial years together."
Working with PS Financials has been an entirely positive experience, according to James:
"PS Financials know their product well and have helped us to set it up exactly to our needs, including work on the VAT simplification and automated bank reconciliations."
UCST/ULT manages the following Academies:
- Barnsley
- Walthamstow
- Paddington
- Sheffield Springs
- Sheffield Park Academy
- Moss Side
- Lambeth
- Northampton
- Salford
| 
