Finances have been an unwelcome focus for education and training providers over the past year.

Take the vocational education sector. The pandemic caused almost half of training providers to lose revenue in 2020 according to the Voice of VET Report 2021. More than half hoped to recover that loss this year. Margins and profitability were expected to be a pressure point for 76% of providers.

This has created a stronger focus on the bottom line than ever before.

Are providers seeing that they need to see?

Three principles to follow to get a full view of your finances

Surfacing the right numbers at the right time (and easily understanding their meaning at a glance) has been a perennial challenge for education and training finance teams. With a multiplicity of inflows and outflows, from student course fee payments to Government funding, it can be difficult to get a full overview and picture of exactly where your organisation’s at – and where it’s going.

The solution? Let your technology do the work for you by following these three principles.

1 Bring all your numbers together in one place

Centralisation of financial data is an obvious goal.

By ensuring everything is either conducted or tracked from a single source of truth, finance teams can ensure they have access to all the information they need across quotes, invoices, payments (and much more) whenever they need it, reducing inaccuracies and strengthening business decisions.

Providers should ensure all their data is in (or is available from) one place. Rather than losing a student invoice in an inbox or forgetting to process a host family payment, a centralised data repository ensures finance can collect, synthesise and access everything from a single location.

 2 See numbers the way they were meant to be seen

Visualisation is where the power of your student management or finance system (or both) comes to the fore. By surfacing the critical finance data you need in attractive, relevant and highly consumable forms through your process, you can immediately see and understand the full picture at a glance.

JR Plus provides full visualisation across everything from outstanding invoices to projected revenue. In just one example, providers can choose to generate clear visual representations of what has been invoiced to a student as well as the Total Lifetime Value of that student. They can also return easy-to-digest visuals of outstanding invoices over 30, 60 or 90 days, adding up to comfort and control.

3 Give yourself permission to play with the numbers

Having your numbers centralised shouldn’t stop you from manipulating them the way you need to. Whether it’s changing course fees on the fly by applying discounts or communicating flexibly in bulk (think student payment reminders), you need to ensure data has room to move as well as integrity.

This is where customisation and integrations help. With an SMS that meshes with the specialist finance systems you choose (like MYOB and Xero) while providing the ability to customise actions and reporting throughout the process, working with tech becomes playful rather than puritanical.