Finance software for Academies

[vikpaw]

Was just talking to the IT manager @Jacques and he said we took Sage many years ago on Capita's advice (will double check though, as i'm sure they had FMS then), but it didn't do what we wanted at the time. Couldn't cope with foreign currency, funny days of the week, etc. so we ditched it. When we were on Integris we had no end of problems making the MIS communicate with Finance package, so that's a big plus of SIMS and FMS talking to eachother.

[elsiegee40]

The problem in hand is an Academy Trust about to take another school into the trust with a subsidiary Training School company to run and FMS doesn't really meet the needs... hopefully this exercise will show what, if anything, does. The ability to cope with VAT and income other than GAG is essential.... although at least we don't have to cope with fees and billing parents!

Academies are more like commercial businesses financially these days in that they are not just a simple single company.

[simonmarkholland]

You'd never know it from this thread but around 60% of academies have chosen FMS.

PS Financials claim they have 40% of the Academy market, and Corero's Resource Financials claim around 35%.

[matt40k]

PS Financials claim they have 40% of the Academy market, and Corero's Resource Financials claim around 35%.

Guess you've never heard sales people do math?

[Oaktech]

We are going to be using corero with serco progresso... which is something i got told yesterday. So i'm going to need to do some reading!

[zag]

We use Corero also.

Actually pretty nice system with a simple SQL backend.

[Sylv3r]

We are going through the process next week of interviewing 3 finance software vendors,

CAPITA FMS, Sage and Aggresso.

I'll come up with some questions for the interviews, but I would be interested if you have any ideas or have gone through a similar process and already have some questions to hand.

Thanks

[vikpaw]

I'd love to hear your results @Sylv3r
We want to see a decent way to handle assets, and link to the purchase of them plus depreciation.
Payroll needs to be handled.
Would be good to be able to manage separate funds. I.e. voluntary funds, and or other monies separately.
A strong link to an MIS is useful even if it's just an import function. Need to be able to generate fees for kids / families and then pull that data in. So ability for it to store bill payers is useful.
be great if you could get some answers to those.
Lastly interested in price as it looks at a brief glance that SAGE was at least a third of what we are paying for FMS.

[djwingfield]

I remember somebody on the Serco stand at the bett was plugging Corero Business Systems.

[GREED]

I would very much like to hear your feedback too @Sylv3r

[Sylv3r]

Thanks @vikpaw, i'll post my questions in this thread when I think of them tomorrow. Will happily shares costs via PM but don't really want to post them on here. I have the initial quotes but once I get them drilled down a bit, I'll send you some info over.
@GREED, I will let you know what I think by the end of the week.

Sage and Agresso are in school tomorrow - CAPITA couldn't come in so wish to do a webex on Thursday.... not a good start although we already are a FMS school.

[PhilNeal]

Just for clarity - we couldn't make Sylv3r's date but as a general principle we do visit and demo.

[Sylv3r]

Just for clarity - we couldn't make Sylv3r's date but as a general principle we do visit and demo.

Apologies @PhilNeal, re-reading my message just to clarify the interviews were arranged at short notice and not that CAPITA opted not to come into school as we were already a customer. They gave us alternative dates, but we wished to make a decision sooner rather than later due to the short timescales we have been set ourselves.

[vikpaw]

Just to clarify, in my previous post, i was talking about FEES. Not 'free' as i inadvertently typoed.

I'm interested to see how any of these packages handle Fees. At moment it's nicely kept within SIMS. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it works well.

How do these other offerings integrate, and would you have to move the financial element of fees and invoicing into them in order for things to work smoothly. I would hope the packages geared for education would be more flexible in these respects than say something like SAGE.

If anyone from Capita is listening, i've asked my account manager for more details on Asset Management, whenever anyone is free , i guess after Easter now.

[elsiegee40]

I think that the requirements of MIS for Academies and Independents are different @vikpaw

While acdamies need much better financial accounting in line with independents, they don't charge fees. Software written or adapted for academies doesn't necessarily go the extra step to handle fees.

SIMS does, but I don't think it's the widest used MIS by independents largely due to its cost. I couldn't tell you what is though.