The ROI of consolidating school finance software across your local authority

For a finance team supporting maintained schools, return on investment for financial management software is more than the licence fee. It can be measured four ways: the money saved when an authority buys for its schools rather than each buying alone, the time given back to stretched central teams and individual school business managers, the control that comes from seeing every school's position early enough to act, and the confidence of consistent, compliant data.  

With more schools slipping into deficit each year and average revenue balances falling (£150,900 per school in 2024-25, down from £161,800 the year before), the case for cutting costs and freeing capacity is stronger than ever. Central local authority teams are leaner and under real time pressure, finance knowledge too often sits with one or two individuals rather than in the systems themselves, and hours are lost to manual data entry and spreadsheet reformatting that could be spent better elsewhere.

The best savings are often achieved when an authority buys on behalf of its schools. Schools can procure their finance systems separately but will usually pay a standard per-school price. 

For example, with Access Education for local authorities, a maintained school buying finance and budgeting software on its own typically pays around £3,000 to £4,000 a year. When an authority buys on behalf of its schools, that price drops sharply through economies of scale, with better rates for ten or more schools, falling to around £1,260 per school, roughly 60% less, and the per-school price drops further with a contract for more schools. 

• One contract, one price, one renewal: When schools buy budgeting, accounting, purchasing and payroll systems separately, often from different suppliers on different contracts, they carry duplicated costs on every one: separate licences, separate onboarding, and separate support fees. When a local authority purchases on behalf of its school, it means fewer procurement exercises, fewer renewal cycles and one commercial relationship to manage rather than several.  
• Better value together than apart: Consolidating multiple finance products with one provider usually costs less than buying the same capabilities from different providers, and the effect is well established beyond the education sector: Deloitte's analysis of integrating finance and procurement operations found it can deliver a 20% to 40% uplift in realised savings and a 10% to 30% improvement in operational efficiency.  
• Shared value: Buying centrally spreads the shared costs too. With Access Education for local authorities, work such as the annual budget build is done once by us, for all schools rather than each school paying for its own, bringing the per-school cost down again, whilst saving time and reducing reliance on individual school expertise.  

This matters more as public scrutiny of school spending grows. The Schools Financial Value Standard and the DfE's wider focus on value for money reward exactly this kind of consolidated, well-managed buying – and the DfE's own Maximising Value for Pupils programme has put the "opaque costs" of fragmented school software squarely on the agenda. 

One large local authority Access Education customer, managing more than 50 schools, moved off separate, school-by-school systems onto one standardised finance and budgeting platform and saw duplicated effort and cost fall across the board: over 10 hours of staff time saved on every payroll cycle, and audit preparation cut by 80%. As one of the finance team put it, "We invested in the system, and in return, we saved time and helped schools save money. It really has been a win across the board." Read the full story.

When each school in an authority is using a different collection of finance systems, central authority teams can end up spending a lot of time chasing submissions, rebuilding reports or trying to make sense of them. 

With Access Education for local authorities, a big time saving comes from the budget build. Setting up each school's budget for the year is detailed, technical work, and for a business manager who does it once a year it can be slow and easy to get wrong. When an authority buys Access Education Finance and Budgets on its schools' behalf, that build is done for them centrally by our expert team, rather than every school working it out alone. Across an authority, that lifts hours of complex set-up off every business manager.  

Beyond this, time is saved through: 

• Less manual data handling. When finance and budgeting share one connected view, data flows between them rather than being entered and reconciled twice. 
• Less chasing. With a consolidated view across schools, the central team can see what's been submitted, what's outstanding and where things are stuck, rather than chasing updates school by school. 
• Less report rebuilding. When the data already sits in one place, statutory returns and authority-wide reporting no longer take hours of manual reformatting every cycle.  

One large Access Education local authority customer, after consolidating more than 50 schools onto one system, cut VAT uploads from hours to 17 minutes and saved over 10 hours of staff time on every payroll cycle.  

At Liverpool City Council, automating purchase-to-pay across its 130+ schools reduced administrative work and moved teams towards paperless working. As Gary Burke, Group Finance Manager, put it: "the automation of certain processes has been a huge help in reducing admin." Read the Liverpool City Council story.

Fragmented systems make authority-wide oversight a manual job: data gathered school by school, in different formats, out of date by the time it is pulled together. By the time a school's deficit shows up in an annual return, the authority is dealing with the consequences rather than preventing them. 

A single, consolidated view changes that. When an authority can see every school's budgets and actuals in real time, it can spot a school heading towards deficit early and step in while there is still time to change course, rather than finding out after the fact. That shift from reacting to acting early is one of the biggest advantages of consolidation, and one of our largest local authority partners manages more than 450 schools from exactly this kind of single view. 

• Real-time visibility across schools. A consolidated view of budgets and actuals across the authority, without waiting for each school to submit figures or reconciling different formats by hand.  
• Consistent data and standards. When every school works to the same chart of accounts and reporting structure, figures are comparable across the authority, benchmarking becomes possible, and statutory reporting is far simpler, and more accurate. 
• Staffing costs kept visible. Staffing is the largest part of any school budget. When payroll data feeds into finance and budgets, rising costs from supply cover, overtime or incremental pay are visible as they happen, rather than surfacing only when a school is already heading for deficit. 
• Earlier intervention. With current data rather than year-old returns, the central team can spot a school heading towards trouble and act while there is still time. 

Tower Hamlets Council has seen this across its maintained schools. Moving budgeting off spreadsheets removed a single point of failure and gave headteachers 3-5 year scenario planning alongside their existing workload, while giving the central team consistent reports across the borough. As Suhal Kadir of the council's corporate finance team put it: "Access Education Budgets has massively improved budgeting efficiency across maintained schools in the borough... cloud-based software removes any of the risk associated with spreadsheets, staff turnover and doing aspects of budgeting manually." Read the Tower Hamlets story.

The final return is harder to put a number on, but for a finance team it may matter most: the assurance that the numbers are right, the authority is compliant, and there is one partner accountable when something needs sorting. 

• Compliance is easier to evidence. When every school works to the same structure and the audit trail is captured automatically, statutory returns and audits stop being a scramble to gather and reconcile data and become something the authority can produce on demand. 
• Consistency across every school. One shared structure means the authority is no longer reconciling different charts of accounts or chasing schools to correct figures. Data is comparable, reporting is consistent, and there are fewer places for error to hide.  
• Protection against risk. In many schools the budget depends on one person and their spreadsheets. When finance data lives in a shared system rather than individual files, the risks of losing knowledge when people leave are minimised. 
• One accountable partner. One provider means one support relationship and consistent service, rather than several suppliers pointing at each other when something goes wrong, and a single team that understands how the authority works. 

At St Georges Primary in the Wirral, headteacher Bernie Cassidy adopted consolidated finance and budgeting software specifically to close the skills gap that arises when school leaders without a finance background carry financial responsibility, reducing reliance on spreadsheets and the risk of error. As one of the top-performing schools in the Wirral, St Georges' approach has since shaped how the wider authority tackles the same challenge, with Bernie a strong advocate for using modern systems to minimise the risk of human error in financial management. Read the St George’s Primary story.

We understand that local authorities have a large degree of flexibility in the level they support their schools with purchasing financial systems. Some mandate a provider for their maintained schools; some recommend one and let each school contract individually; some fund a central contract for everyone; others take on training and first-line support themselves. The right approach depends on the authority's budget, how much central control it wants, and how its schools prefer to buy. What matters is that the software, and the commercial arrangement around it, flexes to fit. 

Whichever route an authority takes, there are a few considerations: 

Recommend or mandate a provider. Some authorities steer schools towards a single provider for finance and budgeting systems; others require it. Either way, consistency across schools gives the authority comparable data, common reporting and one provider relationship to manage, while schools on the same system can lean on each other and the central team for support. Where schools retain the choice, setting out the benefits clearly is what drives take-up. 

Choose the contracting model that fits. An authority might fund one central contract for all its schools, which usually unlocks the best value, or let schools contract individually while still benefiting from the authority's recommended route. Both work. The single-contract route tends to be cheapest per school, but it is not the only way, and the arrangement can flex to what the authority can fund. 

Support schools through procurement. Most single-school finance software falls below the level at which a full tender is required, so schools can often buy directly or through a framework. Helping schools understand the route that fits, and the value of consolidating rather than adding another disconnected system, is where a central team makes a real difference. 

Build your central team's expertise. Some authorities want to support their schools directly rather than send every query to the supplier. A train-the-trainer approach accredits the central finance team to deliver training and first-line support themselves, giving the authority control and independence while schools still get help from people they already know. 

Access Education works with over 40 local authorities across all of these models, and is available through the main procurement routes authorities and schools already use, whether that is a central contract, an established framework or schools contracting directly.