November release items

Posted  2nd February 2013

As promised last month we were working on something a little bit different. 'Analysis Tags' were released in November following a great deal of work by the development team. This offers an innovative, yet simple way for you to:

  • Perform lower level reporting beneath existing budget/General Ledger codes
  • Track and report on all expenditure, therefore justifying expenditure of specific income (for example, Pupil Premium and Sports grant)
  • Segment your budget into departments or other self-defined categories

We believe that this is something really quite unique, bringing an enormous amount of additional reporting power, whilst being incredibly simple to use.

We attended the NASBM conference in Birmingham at the end of the month, where we showcased the software and the new functionality. It was met with a great deal of interest and excitement, with many people commenting on how beneficial it will be to track and report on specific expenditure.

As ever, there were additional features released, these included:

  • Ability to import multiple budget entries
  • An improved import process to use lettering over numbers and to remember previous state
  • Enhanced Income calculators to show total number of pupils per year and have following years pre-populate with pupil numbers

All help articles are updated and ready, but should you feel that you require any additional assistance, please don't hesitate to get in touch via the helpdesk.

Next Steps: Looking for improvement...

Whilst we have recently delivered new functionality and an improved Salary monitor, along with interactive help, we felt we needed to re-visit a specific screen within SBS Online.

We are currently working to improve the Staff by Year report. We acknowledge that having to export to excel then apply formulae is not ideal. With this in mind, please see below some of the items we are considering for our next release:

  • User definable columns
  • Commitments for each contract for each month of the year
  • Subtotals on screen for all filtered information
  • Default sub-totalling when sorted by specific columns

As with all new releases, full detail will be offered in the home screen with updated interactive help articles available when released.