If you are running finance across two, three or four schools from a collection of spreadsheets, you are not doing it wrong. You are doing what most small MAT finance leads have always done. Excel is flexible, familiar and already paid for. For a Trust of your size, it feels like the proportionate choice.
The problem is not that Excel does not work. It is that working within its limits is costing you something that never shows up on a spreadsheet: time, accuracy and control. Three things a small MAT CFO cannot afford to lose.
The role is bigger than the team
In a Trust of two to five schools, there is usually one senior finance person carrying everything. Budgeting, forecasting, compliance, reporting, governance. The work of a finance team in a single role.
That is not a criticism. It is the reality. And it means every inefficiency in your tools hits harder than it would anywhere else.
When your consolidation takes a day longer than it should, that is a day you do not have. When a formula drifts and you spend an afternoon tracking it down, that afternoon does not come back. When a reforecast requires rebuilding half a spreadsheet because one assumption changed, the drag on a role with no spare capacity adds up quickly. Nobody flags these things as crises. They become normal. And that is exactly why they persist.
What your staffing budget is actually built on
The biggest single cost in any MAT is staffing. In a small Trust running on Excel, the staffing budget is almost always built from estimates: figures carried forward from last year, adjusted manually for known changes, and updated when someone remembers to do it.
That is not a criticism of the CFO. It is what Excel makes possible. What it does not make possible is a staffing baseline built directly from payroll reality, where every contracted role, every pay grade and every NI and pension assumption flows automatically into the budget.
The difference matters most when something changes mid-year. A pay award, a new appointment, a restructure. In Excel, each change requires manual rework across multiple sheets. In IMP Planner, changes flow through the model automatically because the staffing baseline is connected to real payroll data, not a manually maintained spreadsheet.
The assumptions problem
In a small MAT running across multiple schools, the budget is only as reliable as the assumptions underneath it. If assumptions are held in different spreadsheets, updated at different times by different people working from different starting points, the consolidated picture is unreliable before anyone has started.
IMP Planner sets assumptions at MAT level once and applies them consistently across every school simultaneously. Central charges, Pupil Premium uplifts, NI and pension rates, pay scales: all embedded in the logic of the system. When something changes, it flows through the whole Trust automatically. No manual updates. No version drift. No reconciliation at the end to find out where the numbers diverged.
The committed spend your budget does not show
There is a category of financial risk that Excel-based budgeting almost never captures accurately: committed spend. Purchase orders raised but not yet invoiced. Contracts approved but not yet active. Recurring subscriptions that sit outside the budget spreadsheet because nobody updated it after the renewal.
For a small MAT CFO trying to give governors an accurate picture of available budget, the gap between what the spreadsheet shows and what has actually been committed is a constant source of uncertainty.
IMP Purchasing sits on the same platform as IMP Planner and connects every purchase directly to the correct budget line in real time. Budget holders see their true available budget including all committed items, not just the static figure from the last spreadsheet update. Every order raised reduces the visible budget immediately, so the picture the CFO presents to governors reflects what has actually been committed, not just what has been invoiced.
That closes one of the most persistent blind spots in small MAT finance, without requiring any manual reconciliation between a purchasing system and a budget spreadsheet.
What compliance season looks like on Excel
Budget Forecast Returns, in-year monitoring, audits: the compliance calendar in a small MAT is identical to the one in a large Trust. The volume of statutory work does not reduce because the team is smaller.
On Excel, BFR preparation means pulling data from multiple sources, reconciling figures, formatting outputs and checking everything before submission. Excelsior Multi-Academy Trust described the change after moving to IMP Planner: “Automated BFR template management reduces time and effort for annual returns.” For a CFO working alone against a fixed deadline, automated BFR preparation is hours recovered every cycle.
The question of cost
The most common reason small MAT CFOs stay with Excel is cost. Investing in new software when the current approach technically functions is a hard internal conversation.
The more useful question is what the current approach actually costs. The hours spent on manual consolidation each month. The time rebuilding reforecasts from scratch each cycle. The governance reporting that requires a day of preparation before it can be presented. These costs do not appear on a line in a budget, but they are real and they accumulate every month in a role with no spare capacity.
IMP Planner is built for MATs of all sizes, including Trusts of two to five schools. The implementation is sized to match. The support comes from former MAT finance professionals who have worked in the same environment. And the change in the role, from one defined by manual overhead to one built on reliable, connected data, is felt within the first budget cycle.
What the next budget season looks like
A budget cycle on IMP Planner starts with staffing baselines drawn from payroll reality, not manual estimates. Assumptions are set once at Trust level and flow to every school automatically. Scenarios that previously took days to model take minutes. The BFR does not require a separate consolidation exercise. The consolidated Trust-wide picture is available without anyone having to build it. And the committed spend picture is accurate because IMP Purchasing keeps budgets and purchase activity connected throughout the year.
That is not a different version of the same process. It is a different process. And for a small MAT CFO carrying the full weight of Trust finance in a single role, the difference is significant.
Speak to our team and see how IMP Planner works for small Trusts.
