Four years ago we launched IMP Planner to the MAT finance world – now we’re proud to be working with 57% of large MATs…and growing.
Large trusts have to deal with a lot of financial complexity – and are often managing it with systems designed for single schools with clunky MAT functionality bolted on.
Some of the common issues MATs wrestle with include:
- Struggling to get consolidated oversight across multiple schools.
- Too much time required to modify fundamental budget drivers for each individual school.
- Concern that there is disparity in assumptions across school budgets.
- Lack of confidence in the consistency of numbers being presented.
- Drowning in spreadsheets and relying on Excel to merge budget and financial data, adding risk and unnecessary effort to forecasting.
The inability to quickly understand the impact of pay or funding changes.
At IMP, we work with MATs of all shapes and sizes up and down the country to provide our powerful budget management software, which is designed specifically for multi-academy trusts and packed with robust capabilities.
Within our growth story over the past four years, more and more large trusts are now working with us to take away their financial management ‘pain points’…so what is it that is leading them to switch to IMP?
Ability to create centralised assumptions
“Greenwood Academies Trust selected IMP for its additional functionality and efficiency, in particular the ability to create centralised assumptions that impact all academies which is replacing our previous manual input processes. Our academies also welcome the ability to make changes to forecasts at any point in the month and to always have a rolling three years of financial forecast. The flexibility to import actual data at any point, with transaction-level detail, will simplify the process of variance analysis.”
Eddie Pearce, Chief Financial Officer, Greenwood Academies Trust
Monthly re-forecasting
“For Bath and Wells Multi-Academy Trust the greatest thing about IMP is forecasting – we now re-forecast our schools budgets every month, whereas previously we were only doing this once or twice a year. Trustees and SLT have much more confidence in the information they are receiving, they feel it is more accurate, and can make strategic decisions better. With the constant forecasting data and accuracy of data, the BFR process is also so much easier.”
Zoe Davey, Chief Finance Officer, Bath and Wells Multi-Academy Trust
Powerful and insightful management information
“IMP has revolutionised the budgeting and forecasting operations at DRET. It is the ideal software for a large MAT seeking strong budget management and longer-term planning capabilities. IMP enables senior management to make informed decisions through the provision of clear and comprehensive trust-wide and academy level financial data. Time previously lost merging and manipulating multiple spreadsheets is now used to provide powerful and insightful management information. The ease of scenario planning and multiple year budgeting is a game changer for DRET.”
Peter Wilson, Interim Chief Finance Officer, David Ross Education Trust
Will Jordan, Co-Founder at IMP Software said:
“We are thrilled that over 300 MATs – and 57% of large trusts – already trust us with their budgeting needs. From a standing start in 2019 I could not be prouder of the team and I am very grateful for all of the support from customers and partners along the way. The input of our customers on our journey, from their contribution to IMP Voice – our dedicated customer ideation platform – to their wonderful Trustpilot reviews, has been nothing short of incredible.
“Whilst we are delighted with the growth that we have achieved, we are very aware that the sector has been burnt by growth stories in the past, so from day one we have been planning for more growth than we expect that we will achieve. This approach is working well, and will continue, to ensure that we won’t be another provider that falls into the trap of growth at all costs, where customers ultimately lose out.
“Our customer-focused approach has been a key part of getting us to where we are, and will be a key part of our future mission. The team have done an amazing job and, despite our growth, our customer satisfaction score has improved every year and we continue to attract a steady stream of 5* Trust Pilot reviews. We are excited to keep improving what we do and become a significant provider that ultimately helps the sector to deliver smarter MAT Finance.”
For more information about how we are helping larger MATs (15+ schools), and other case studies, please visit https://impsoftware.co.uk/largemat/.
