Administrative cost saving. Online payments?

[user1483972886]

Dcs are at a small primary (less than 100 on roll) so finances are tight. However we have 2 administration people. 2 x 80%. Which is a lot compared to other schools aound us (most have 1).
Has anyone looked at ways to reduce administration costs? How about online banking currently everything is cash / cheque so £2s for this and that and in some cases people paying daily for lunch...
I can only think this is an administrative burden.
Has anyone else gone to online banking or one of these school payment systems?
Our nursery swopped from cash to online banking and the parents aND staff found it easier.
I am thinking if we can reduce cash payments we can reduce administration staff and hence wages?
Anyone have any experience of this?

Many thanks

Most schools use wisepay

Do a skills check on the staff. See how efficient they are. Check their IT skills especially

Our schools use School Money - easy for parents and efficient and cheaper for the school. We've also transferred on to BACS for all transfer payments for services etc. We now don't have to pay for cash collections or processing of cheques, etc.

Schools can use it, but they have to offer a workaround for those who do not wish to use it. Does your parent community actually want it?

For everyone who likes an online payment system, there's another who detests it.

Also, if you are looking at improving efficiencies in the school admin, it might be worth looking at how their time is actually taken up and using that as the basis for recommending changes (rather than what it might look like to an outsider)

And do factor in that 2x part time staff gives greater flexibility/resisilance .

Tbh we are overspending this year by circa £20k and spend circa £38k on admin. I think we beyond the point of people's preferences.
How do you find out what they are busy with other than asking what are you busy with? My impressions there will be resistance to any change but it's that or make a teacher redundant.. we have 80% more administration than any other schools of comparable size in our neighbourhood.

Does anyone have a template for a skills check?

Do you have a role at the school other than as a parent? Is it your place to be doing a schools check?

God - who are you in relation to the school? You sound completely clueless. You're talking about people's jobs and livelihoods, please get some proper hr advice.

...I'm going to guess you're a governor or something?

Parentpay
I'm surprised schools still take cash and daily payment for dinners went out last century!

If your school has gone cashless have they already done a Hatchett job? ;-) it's good to get feedback on different systems. A friend of mine'a school the kids pay for their lunch with finger print! I think we are some way off that...

I don't think you'd save a whole headcount.

And it seems most schools ask parents to use electronice payment but still 'allow' cash payment. This is also true for the nursery we use. At the nursery 99% payments are now online but direct to the bank account rather than via any system. It dramatically reduced the workload for our treasurer who was a volunteer!

No I think you are right 2014newme we probably wouldn't save a whole person but maybe 0.3? It's just an idea for now. It has been suggested before but predictably shot down by the admin guy!

In time you would but it takes quite a lot to implement, manage, communicate at the start.

I'd doubt going cashless would really save that much time. You'd need to do an audit of what jobs they are actually doing and work from there.

Just FYI being in a small school doesn't mean the work load is proportionally smaller. Many jobs need to be done whether you have 5 students or 500. I've worked in a small school (less than 100) that had 1.5 admin assistants. One that was 300+ pupils that had 3. One that was around 200 and only had 1.

How long have both staff been in place and how much would redundancy cost? How much will it cost to get temporary cover for illness? Are admin staff allowed vacation days during term time?

There's a much wider picture here and unfortunately you may end up with increased costs in the short and long term depending on the above.

It would probably be more productive to look at ways to raise funding rather than ways to decrease spend.

We use parentpay. And if you don't have access to the internet you can go to a local shop and put money on your child's account.

I do think it's a good idea and would save admin time.

We use Tucasi for as much as possible - school meals, trips, permission slips, etc.

When you say "admin" people - what exactly are they? We have a much larger school (510 pupils) and we have a full time business manager, plus 5 FTE office staff who man reception, deal with attendance and welfare, secretarial support, day to day finance etc. So that's 6 FTE for 510 pupils - you have 1.6 for 100. If they do nothing but finance, you are overstaffed, if they do lots of other support stuff too then I suspect you aren't!

We've experienced several online payments systems and the most user-friendly one was scopay. There was also an option for parents to have a card to top up their scopy account with paypoint (at local newsagents and petrol stations). So this was more workable for parents who were "cash only" (just like topping up the electric meter etc.).

Two admin people is useful because they can cover each other's sickness etc. And I would imagine they do a bit more than both handle cash every day. Ours run the library, coordinate volunteers, sort out trip bookings, swimming, send out letters and maintain records, photocopying, answer the phones, deal with parents, make appointments etc. etc. You may find that having 2x0.8 admin staff is cheaper than the additional TAs/teachers that would be required to get some of these things done and the teachers can (hopefully) crack on with teaching instead of working out who hasn't returned the permission slip for whatever.

Who the hell are you? You're deluded if you think a cashless system would save admin hours. Cashless has many advantages but time saving ain't one of them.

I'm only a Guide leader so not the scale of a school but we use Gocardless (a direct debit system with low overheads) and standing orders for subs. Saves me loads of time. Not least because I can download the bank statements and copy and paste into my spreadsheet rather than having to manually write down every payment in.

Our school uses Parentpay and for things like trips ONLY accepts that, nothing else. You can top it up with cash at PayPoint too apparently.

For e.g. Comic Relief they will take cash.

"I think we beyond the point of people's preferences."

If it is a state school. You have an obligation not to debar people because they may choose not to use a particular payment method. You have to continue to provide a different payment mechanism for those who do not want to use online payment.

Only private schools can insist on online without providing an alternative.

And I do rather agree that the admin saving time is not what you would expect, even if it exists at all.

And that has to be set against the potential costs for a redundancy. Plus any future costs (direct and indirect) of bringing gin a temp to cover illness etc.

Think carefully

Online payment systems are great. As a school administrator I loved it...much less work for me! BUT one our one year "introductory offer" was finished we couldn't afford it!

The annual cost was several hundred pounds and then there is also a charge on each transaction. We did the sums and there was no way we could justify the cost so we didn't renew it.

Oh and dealing with the various cash payments from parents is a TINY part of the work of a school office!

If you don't know what your admin staff are currently doing, then it will be next to impossible to prove that what you are achieving by implementing the online system.
So the first step is for someone to really get to grips with what they are actually doing that takes them twice as long as the admin staff in comparable schools. Which means collecting management data about how they spend their time.
This is why IT and tech projects so often fail to deliver, because the problem that they are being used to solve hasn't been properly defined in the the first place. You can only decide on your solution, once you know what the problem is.