Havering Council is implementing a budgeting and forecasting system from COA Solutions (www.coasolutions.com). This Collaborative Planning system will improve the Council’s budget development and monitoring and provide greater control over the Council’s expenditure. The COA Solutions system, which is being integrated with the Council’s Oracle Financials system, will be made available to over 600 authorised council managers and is expected to go live in August 2009.
Denis Riddle, Systems Accountant, at London Borough of Havering Council, says, “Budgeting and forecasting is currently done outside of our Oracle system and involves manually consolidating information onto separate spreadsheets. This is time-consuming and creates issues with version control and data manipulation.”
The Council evaluated a number of software providers. COA Solutions’ Collaborative Planning was selected because of its ease-of-use and advanced functionality as well as COA Solutions’ understanding of the Council’s needs.
Denis Riddle explains, “COA Solutions closely understood our requirements as a Local Authority and it quickly became apparent that the budgeting and forecasting system had been designed with Councils in mind.”
Collaborative Planning will provide 600 staff including service managers across the London Borough of Havering with the ability to easily create and update budgets and forecasts and report on these budgets in real-time, providing a single view of the finances. It will also improve the management and monitoring of the Council’s capital expenditure.
Denis Riddle comments, “With Collaborative Planning, the time-consuming production and consolidation of spreadsheets will be eliminated, enabling managers to budget and forecast with greater ease and efficiency. We also expect time savings in terms of finance staff time, allowing them to focus on supporting managers with the creation and monitoring of their budgets and examining and challenging forecasts.”
Denis Riddle adds, “The new COA Solutions system will empower service managers to become more closely involved in the budget monitoring process so that we can improve our service delivery. With integration of Collaborative Planning with our Oracle Financials system, we will also be provided with an accurate and real-time picture of existing and forecast spend across the Council, improving financial transparency and enabling greater control over costs.”
