Save time, stay accurate, and anticipate any scenario
IRIS Financial Planner makes it easy to gather information from your finance system, as well as use this information to implement changes across all your schools – whether you need to make major changes or minor adjustments.
Not that you will ever be taken by surprise. Our financial planning software ensures you can run endless scenarios to see how possible changes might impact your MAT and its schools.
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Flexible MAT financial operating models
IRIS Financial Planner fits your MAT’s processes and performs automated calculations, no matter your operating model – whether that’s GAG pooling, top-slicing or a combination of the two.
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Single-action MAT budget creation
Generate budgets for all of your schools in one go, eliminating duplicate work. Adjust settings, scenarios and approvals simultaneously, and effortlessly generate consolidated reports across your schools.
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Centrally manage key budget assumptions
Ensure consistency and save time by updating pay scales, National Insurance, funding rates, and other assumptions – all in one action that can handle multiple budgets and locations.
Check out the software
Click below to dive into IRIS Financial Planner and check out what our Budget versus Actuals report and payroll reconciliation look like.
See where you can set funding models, manage all aspects of your budget centrally, configure the system how you like, and more!
How our software makes a difference to MATs
Our financial planning software is built for your sector and your trust, with input from trust CFOs. It’s designed to help MATs lean into their organising strengths and set out clear, consistent budgets that provide schools with financial clarity.
It meets the high bar MATs have for budgeting, with powerful automation and drill-down functionality that turns figures into actionable data – and stops information gaps threatening your plans to deliver great pupil outcomes.
Ready to talk to one of our experts?
Want to see how our school budgeting and financial planning software measures up to your MATs challenges? Fill in the form to book a free demo.
Join over 250 MATs using IRIS Financial Planner.
Features
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Transactional drill-down
No hopping between screens and systems
Investigate discrepancies between budgeted and actual figures within one solution, drilling down into individual transactions and identifying the root causes of budget overruns or underspending.
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Budget vs forecast report
Gain a more accurate view without resorting to spreadsheets
Track performance against initial budgets and updated forecasts to gain a precise view of your cash position. You can still enjoy all the flexibility of a spreadsheet by showing, hiding and reordering columns.
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Flexibility in every task
Manage your trust how you want
You can run your payroll reconciliation from MAT-level or by individual school, use the language that reflects your trust by customising terminology, and budget using GAG pooling, top-slicing or a combination of both.
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Pupil-weighted calculations
Set a foundation for your budget
Easily calculate General Annual Grant income based on pupil numbers, ensuring you have a solid basis for setting budgets.
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Custom profile templates
Move faster at the start of each cycle
Set up budgets with predefined categories and get a level of consistency that enables you to make comparisons over time periods and across schools. Save significant time compared to building budgets from scratch every cycle.
Featured Guide
Guide to effective budgeting
Our guide, Controlling Financial Chaos, highlights the importance of effective budgeting and financial management for long-term sustainability. You also get to find out how one trust used IRIS Financials to increase its financial stability.
"We have been using IRIS Financials for 5 years now, so we were keen to begin using IRIS Financial Planner as soon as we could. The integration between IRIS Financials and IRIS Financial Planner makes our life much easier, allowing us to generate accurate, detailed costings as well as live budget monitoring of actual income and expenditure. As a result, we have been able to simplify and streamline our budget planning and monitoring process across our Trust of 10 schools. "
Working with IRIS Financials to handle actuals and commitments
Some say their school budgeting software syncs with the rest of their financial solutions, and it does… to an extent.
However, IRIS Financial Planner was built to make MAT forecasting a breeze when coupled with IRIS Financials. The two share data seamlessly.
You can quickly push budgets into Financials and then bring back actuals and commits into Financial Planner.
Frequently asked questions
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If you are:
- Unable to complete actions across all your schools centrally
- Have to update national tables manually (pay scales, National Insurance contributions, and more)
- Feel like you can’t work to your budgeting system (you cannot use GAG pooling, for instance)
- Are faced with limits on how you run scenarios
…then you need IRIS Financial Planner.
IRIS Financial Planner is continuously developed based on feedback from a focus group that includes twenty CFOs. As a customer, you can sign up to be part of this group and influence further development.
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Very well. For example, do you need software that can pull both actuals and commits from your financial planning software?
By combining IRIS Financial Planner with IRIS Financials, you can do both.
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Our software covers all bases compared to regular budgeting solutions for businesses, then raises the bar further with MAT– and school-dedicated functionality.
That means you have everything to gain by moving from general budgeting software to IRIS Financial Planner.
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If you’re still growing, then we would say a spreadsheet is not sustainable – and we believe it’s the same if you have reached the end of your MAT growth journey. How much time can you realistically spend repeating the same budgeting operations for each school, or hope that basic software can handle the scale of the challenge you need to meet every day?
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Does four weeks sound good?
This is the timeframe we aim for. We achieve this by giving your MAT a dedicated implementation consultant.
Furthermore, your setup is bespoke to your trust. You just have to send an existing report, payroll, or other key document over, and this is usually enough to get everything up and running.
Throughout this process, you get:
- Telephone support
- Email support
- Built-in video support
- Live chat support
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