Changing MIS, But What About Finance/HR/Payroll

[AlexBradley]

Hi,

 

We're looking at moving MIS, hopefully we can ditch CMIS but I've run into some issues.

 

It seems most MIS packages don't come with Finance Packages and those that do support some third party packages, quite often don't do HR/Payroll or they require a third package for it.

 

Is this normal? With CMIS it did everything, and while I've had my issues with it, it seems it does a pretty good job considering what else is out there.

 

So far we really like the look of Bromcom, we've yet to see the Finance side but I've just had confirmation that they do not do HR/Payroll.

 

I was just wondering what other schools have done when moving away from either Sims or CMIS which have built in or optional extras for Finance & HR/Payroll.

 

Would appreciate any extra info that can be provided.

 

Cheers,

Alex

 

Anglesey Primary School

[pcstru]

We used to use SIMS FMS when we were running CMIS/ePortal and then for a while when we switched to Bromcom. Now finance use whatever the Trust says - I don't even know what it is called :-(.

[AlexBradley]

Bumped

[AlexBradley]

Hi pcstru,

 

Cheers for the info. I'm not entirely sure we need a full Payroll package at the moment. It seems like they just want to be able to keep track of staff wages and feed that into budgets along with NI costs, pensions and etc..

[bigdannyb79]

salaries etc are part of the SWF so all MIS must hold these values if thats all your after. Yes they arent all singing HR/payroll packages but should hold the data as they'll need to return that. I'd say Bromcom does as little or as much as most other MIS products out there and the differentiator will be how easily you can report on this info but would have thought all would allow you to bring through salary info that is in the system.

 

I certainly dont think CMIS will hold any information in addition to the other MIS players out there.

 

Bromcom has a nice excel plugin that allows you to pull in live data to a sheet although I dont think it currently does staff data - if they would develop that you could easily build a nice spreadsheet with you financial projections in that had a one click refresh of salary info assuming you have the info accurately entered.

[Bromcom_Marketing]

Bromcom has a nice excel plugin that allows you to pull in live data to a sheet although I dont think it currently does staff data - if they would develop that you could easily build a nice spreadsheet with you financial projections in that had a one click refresh of salary info assuming you have the info accurately entered.

 

This sounds like a really good and useful idea. May I suggest you post this request on Bromcom Support Web Site as an enhancement request. Hopefully other users will also vote for it and get it implemented soon.

[pcstru]

Bromcom has a nice excel plugin that allows you to pull in live data to a sheet although I dont think it currently does staff data - if they would develop that you could easily build a nice spreadsheet with you financial projections in that had a one click refresh of salary info assuming you have the info accurately entered.

I was quite excited by the prospect of an Excel plugin with Bromcom. In reality - it seemed very limited and quite clunky, it was a real disappointment.

[bigdannyb79]

I agree its underdeveloped but it cant be much work to open up other areas of the database now the tool is established. I imagine there is a sense of reluctance to put too much into it as they will point to reports etc rather than firing data out to excel but with the live refresh it can be very useful in some applications and widens the net of potential users of the data. They quickly developed the export for Harris schools which is quite complex where as exporting something like salaries is simply database values with little manipulation required.

 

In my CMIS days I had some lovely excel sheets that refreshed from the SQL database and it was so useful to do and got some very powerful information out to masses, many of which weren't keen users of the MIS but happily worked with the excel analysis quite readily.

 

I'm just wondering if Bromcom haven't tackled permissions in the excel export which might be a reason for staff & salaries not being there.

[vikpaw]

SIMS/FMS (i.e. Capita) didn't really have a suitable payroll option.

Some HR data is stored under the personnel section, but probably not enough to call it a comprehensive package.

 

When I moved my last school from SIMS to Double First Engage, they maintained FMS for a while and have slowly progressed to using Fees in Engage. Payroll is still an issue, however Engage stores a lot of HR data.

At my current schools they use Engage and their full Finance package, again though a lot of HR info is kept in Engage, linking to the Finance package isn't really there, and the Finance package doesn't do Payroll directly. They did have a Payroll module but have now retired it.

 

We've been told to migrate to Payrite (cloud based). It looked okay when demo'ed and seems ok. The other independent schools in the demo seemed okay with it too.

 

I've heard of some other cloud based systems for full HR management, which includes payroll and also staff reviews etc. I think it was called Blue Sky / Skies. It depends what exactly you want to have managed online in the system, how much linking you want to the MIS and how much you're willing to pay for it.

 

We haven't fully exploited the HR area of Engage yet but it's very comprehensive including PD, Events, and a large organisable Doc Storage we can use for holding contracts, id docs, applications etc. We started to do use the Training log in SIMS but it was slow going, it's not usually a huge priority over other academic functions, so people tend to do the minimum and then use exports and excel to manage things.

 

I don't think there is an all singing dancing all-in-one-solution. Impressive if you were happy with CMIS. I think long term I'd rather find a separate package whose speciality is HR / Payroll and make sure that it can talk to the MIS. Longer term, we may want to centralise HR at group level and so a system can take feeds from multiple systems could prove useful. For single site use, it's probably down to the wants of the individual Finance / HR department which will vary between a bursar who does everything to a large admin team.

 

I'm guessing you're on the small side, so can cope with minor manual processes. I'd just get the finance / hr involved early, and let them ask questions and set a minimum functionality requirement for the system. As has been stated, I'm sure they all do the minimum that is required by law for reporting on data, other than that it's pot luck between what they offer and what you want/need.

[localzuk]

We use SIMS for the basic HR stuff, and our payroll is done by an external company (Data Plan). Though, we're moving our finance from FMS to PSFinancials, so I guess we may end up using PSF's solution for that in the future? It's a pain whichever route we take, as you have to maintain a level of information in each school's MIS as well as dealing with whatever you use for HR/Payroll.

[ItsOggy]

We use SIMS for HR and Fees etc but Sage and Sage Payroll for the finance, we have some reports to export data from SIMS to Sage.

[Achandler]

We use CMIS and FMS (controversial combo I knows!).

 

Payroll is still done externally using the actual data within CMIS, CMIS itself doesn't do it for us.

[AlexBradley]

Thanks Vikpaw for your detailed overview. It's difficult to truly understand what one part of your team wants in a package when you have little experience in that field.

 

It seems that if there are any all singing packages, they come in at a hefty cost. Happy might be a tad strong, they like what they know. Personally I think CMIS is 10 years over it's sell by date at best.

 

We're a large Primary but as you say, our admin team is pretty small and it's going to come down to finding a system they all like. I've tried to bring them on as early as possible to get feedback, just seems at the moment the mood is much stronger in the remain camp then the move. But I do want to insure we go with a system our team are happy with that could even save them some workload.

 

Cheers for all the info folks, much appreciated. Seems moving MIS really is a bugger for everyone involved in the process.

[vikpaw]

Seems moving MIS really is a bugger for everyone involved in the process.

Methinks the crowd doth agree.