FSCS is looking to procure a new Financial Planning, Forecasting and Budgeting solution.

The new solution would support the business to do the following:

•Prepare regular forecasts and annual budgets of all cost and revenue accounts in a simple and easily updatable manner;

•Prepare regular forecasts of non-financial information e.g. headcount and claims volumes;

•Monitor actuals against budget and forecasts enabling management to easily identify, understand and report variances;

•Allocation of costs (actuals and forecast) to several categories e.g. for activity-based costing analysis and to various funding categories for levy calculations; and

•Report to senior management, Board and externally.

The contract with the successful provider will include licences, the design and implementation of the solution together with the annual support and maintenance.

The objectives of the solution are:

•All budgeting and forecasting to be undertaken directly within the solution:

oCosts and revenues - management expenses, project costs, compensation costs, levy and recoveries income;

oNon-P&L items including claims volumes; and

oHeadcount/FTE and contractors.

•All associated reporting to be produced from the solution.

•Actuals for all items listed to be automatically and regularly loaded into the solution to support the budgeting and forecasting process and enable variance analysis.

•The solution must be easy to use:

oFSCS requires a solution that is logical and would be readily manageable for input and parameterisation by Finance and Accounting staff. These are expected to be at a semi-professional level and therefore numerate and skilled to intermediate excel proficiency as a minimum and will understand accounting concepts. We would not expect them to have SQL skills, but it is anticipated that the skill level can be called upon from the business in exceptional cases.

•The solution must be flexible and be able to quickly reflect any changes to requirements. For example, the solution must easily allow for any changes or additions to any organisational structures, ABC categories, funding classes, claims products, account lines or cost centres.

•Ability to view real time information – including any cost allocations - once updates and changes are made to budgets and forecasts.

•Budget holders to be able to access the solution with restricted access based on their individually defined cost centres. Budget holders to be able to view latest forecasts and real time access to transactions.

•There will be approximately, not limited to:

o10 full users. These include Finance Team users, who will have full access to the system (Read, Create, Update and Delete) to the data, models, users, configuration, etc.

o3 support users. These will be IT support users, who would have full access (Read, Create, Update and Delete) but to only data and user/admin functions.

o37 read-only users. This includes Budget holders – who will only require access to view data and run report.

•Cost allocations – the solution must be able to perform allocations of actual and budget/forecast data based on defined drivers that may not remain static (e.g., YTD headcount and claims volumes) throughout the year.

•Scenario planning – to have a separate module or area in the solution where various alternate scenarios can be modelled and does not impact the current forecasts and budgets.

•Administration of the solution should be able to be performed circa 80% in-house, once fully implemented. Administration comprises activities such as creating new cost centres, changes to organisational structure, amending user access, amending controllable and volume driven cost classifications, funding classes, claims products and amend calculations.

•Must be able to upload data daily from the ledger system (currently SunSystems), to include full P&L and balance sheet.

•Must be able to upload prescribed system data to the Data Warehouse and have the ability to load data back into the Data Warehouse also.

•Must have a facility to provide confidence that the data loaded into the system is complete and accurate, whether through reconciliation or other means.

•The solution must be adaptable for potential future changes in the systems that it integrates with e.g., Data warehouse or change of Finance systems or other data feeds and possibly move to a more API (Application Programming Interface) based connector.