chooses expenses
Ian Child, Associate Director of Finance

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Basildon & Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Trust (BTUH) are one of the first 10 NHS Foundation Trusts in the country and are an associate teaching hospital.  Providing an extensive range of acute medical services at Basildon University Hospital and Orsett Hospital, they primarily serve the 310,000 population of Basildon and Thurrock in South West Essex, as well as some residents of the neighbouring districts of Brentwood (for whom they are the main provider of cardiology services) and Castle Point. 

With last years budget of £168 million, the Trust treated more than 58,000 inpatients and day cases, provided nearly 260,000 outpatient consultations and attended to nearly 105,000 accident and emergency (A&E) patients. 

“With our manual expenses system, we had no real idea of how much we
were spending on expenses and very little data to report on and analyse.”

The manual system As with most NHS organisations, BTUH operated a manual claiming process. Different forms had to be completed depending on which item was being claimed, with some recorded on official forms but most on spreadsheets or fourth generation photocopies. Once completed forms are passed to line manager for approval and then sent to payroll, where they were checked for errors and omissions. Payroll would then try to obtain the correct information or return all the paperwork to the claimant; for complete forms the mileage allowances were calculated, checked and receipts validated. Payroll were also responsible for the resource heavy task of manually inputting the data in to the payroll system for payment, this took several days each month to input nearly 300 claims.

“You’d be amazed how many
calculation errors you see on
just one claim form!”

The system brief

“Before we implemented expenses, the system was checked by internal
audit, and the results they reported were glowing and the
suggestions they made have been written in to the system already!”

With the compulsory implementation of ESR, BTUH were looking to simply streamline their existing claiming process in order to reduce the time taken to make the claim, authorise, validate and make payment. After seeing a demonstration of expenses, they quickly realised that the system would provide other areas of savings, greater control and additional functionality that had not been originally realised.

Smooth implementation

Once the payroll team had provided Software Europe with the user details and Account Codes, together they planned out system specifications in regards to the authorisation levels, contracted terms and conditions to be included, for example  Agenda for Change and Consultant Contract. The technical team at Software Europe were then able to configure the whole system to BTUH’s exact specifications.

Various communications were sent out to the claimants, in the form of a staff news magazine article, core brief detailing and the main User I.D email with a link to online user demonstrations. After reviewing the system set-up a ‘go live’ date was agreed and roll out commenced.

“Communication and support throughout the implementation process
where vital, Software (Europe) Ltd helped us through the whole
process, successfully!”

Excellent support

Software Europe handle all the support queries, and when the occasional enquiry came through to payroll, they where directed to the support email and helpdesk facility at Software Europe, where the team are always ready to help.

expenses allows claimants to see on the system if the claim is held up by the line manager or the payroll department which stopped many of the enquiry’s, now the majority of calls come from forgotten passwords.

Key Benefits

The benefits to BTUH have exceeded expectations. Not only do they have a more efficient paperless system, but due to the role definitions set up in expenses each employee can clearly see their limits and there has been a reduction in borderline fraudulent claims and over claiming.

The use of flagging expense items that do not adhere to policy; to the claimants and line managers, has given visibility to duplicate claims and over claiming instances, and all parties are naturally becoming more vigilant. The payroll department are saving time, as there is no longer a need to calculate mileage rates and allowances, check for missing information such as assignment number, and additional details such as cost code/department breakdown are all captured in the background. All this has lead to a quicker, clearer and more transparent system for all involved.

June 2010 – Three Years After Purchase

We asked Ian Child, Deputy Director of Finance, Financial Controller at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, to update us on how things have progressed since implementing expenses2010 for the NHS back in 2007 and he replied:

We find that the system operates with very little need for administrative support. Even so, Software Europe continually develop the application and its capabilities and listen to the users. They hold a user group each year where developments and planned enhancements are explained. The user group allows users to provide ideas for future development and is an extremely useful forum for networking with other users. We have seen improvements we suggested at the user group brought into use within impressive timescales.

The system had been tailored to our specific needs and reflects fully the standard set of allowable expenses in the Agenda for change Handbook and Medical and Dental Contracts.

Before we had expenses2010 for the NHS we had no management information to hand on expenditure and volumes of claims. We can now produce information quickly to allow meaningful decisions to be made and provide responses for both Freedom of Information requests and sustainability issues.

The system is fully integrated with ESR. Each month on average more than 3,000 entries are made to ESR payroll system seamlessly. Since implementing the system we have seen a 90% reduction in the number of queries to our payroll team in relation to expenses.

The fact that the system is web based allows our off-site staff to claim without wasting time delivering paperwork to administration. The workflow approval process and emails notifications speed up the approval process and allow everyone involved in the process to be informed of progress.

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