The Trust moved to a NHS shared business service provider for its financial ledger in 2005/06. There were several advantages in terms of management accounts reporting as a result of the move.
The NHS shared business services soft close the ledger on the last day of the month with hard close being on the seventh working day following the month end. Previously the Trust had a hard close ten working days after month end so this has obliged the Trust to streamline the processes for month end but has also enabled it to bring forward its reporting.
Previously budget statements would be printed by the management accountants and sent in the post to the budgetholders. This meant that it was usually two weeks or more before the budget holder received their statement (depending on the vagaries of the postal system).
Information is now available at soft close online to budgetholders. This means that they can review the budget position, investigate variances, influence accruals and other adjustments. This in turn means that by the time hard close is reached, obvious errors/adjustments have been made. Previously budgetholders would wait for their printed budget statements to reach them and would then begin the process of querying information that they thought was incorrect.
Budgetholders now have access to more information than was previously the case. They can run two reports: budget statements which include summary information on who has been paid and how much; and a detailed staff listing which lists basic pay, overtime, enhancements and costs.
This enables managers to check that staff are being paid at the correct rate and are being charged to the correct code. From the budget statement they can drill down on the system to individual invoices for non pay which are scanned on to the system.
Previously any queries of this nature would necessitate management accountants locating the relevant invoice, copying it and sending it in the post. For income they can drill down to the order which raised the invoice. This has meant that some management accountants’ time has been released to focus on their core work.
Historic information is available to new budgetholders on the system so that they can review for trends using this rather than being reliant on the previous budgetholder having given them a paper file with past budget reports on it.
The Trust is able to run a report which identifies if budgetholders are not accessing the system. This information is used when identifying which budgetholders might need to be invited to training, and also to ensure that management accountants can focus on those services where budget monitoring is weaker.
On the eighth working day management accounts prepare commentaries on budget variances at service level for discussion with service and locality Managers and on the 9th day all budget monitoring and variance commentaries are collated for Board and Exec reporting. By this stage the variances should be genuine variances rather than resulting from mis postings.
A pocket guide to finance has been produced for budgetholders covering budgets, and other financial procedures that managers need to be familiar with eg ordering, employing new staff etc.