One to one online tutoring
Excel/PFM course
PFM Training Vault
Onsite year end closedown
Onsite PFM training / help
Online PFM closedown
PFM MOT
One to one tutoring sessions
One to one tutoring sessions are useful for looking at new features, running through year end, training new staff or adressing issues that you cannot easily resolve, such as complex reconciliation issues.
Having someone remote in and work with you can be very time and cost efficient.
Sessions are priced at £99 per hour.
Excel for Private Funds Manager training
Session 1 – Using Excel to tidy up PFM reports. Inserting and deleting rows and columns, Stretching and shrinking rows and columns. Formatting text and numbers. Borders and shading. Adding basic calculations. Scaling options to fit onto page. Pasting to Excel when your printer hasn’t printed.
Session 2 – Interrogating and manipulating PFM reports with Excel – Sorting, Filtering, Subtotals, Conditional Formatting, Charts. Pivot tables.
Session 3 – Using the Report Writer to create your own reports – using Report Writer, exporting to Excel, Using the Excel Import wizard.
Session 4 – Using the PFM Autoread XL feature – creating bulk short codes, Adding bulk Donor information for Gift Aid, CheckMe for checking Parentpay or SchoolComms entries.
Session 5 – Managing spreadsheets of online payment transactions – opening, sorting, deleting dinner money etc. What not to do.
Session 6 – Importing teachers and suppliers from spreadsheets - with online payment IDs for teachers if needed.
Course is £99.
PFM Training Vault
The Private Funds Manager training vault, is a members-only site, with ALL the available training courses for PFM in pre-recorded format.
It allows schools to watch any or all of the training sessions, as often as wished, with the option to pause and try out functions as you go along. Each session has a video presentation and accompanying notes to download.
All existing sessions are available, and we are added more sessions all the time.
Access can be purchased for £99. This covers ALL the courses which are usually charged at £49 per session, so is VERY cost effective.
The courses available currently are:
New User Session (55mins)
How to do a bank reconciliation (5 mins)
Printing cheques (13 mins)
Processing BACS (13 mins)
VAT - processing & reporting
Managing Pupil Premium (25 mins)
Tips & Tricks (50 mins)
Month End procedures (20min)
Financial Year End (35min)
Academic Year End - pupil movements (12 mins)
HealthCheck & Housekeeping (30mins)
Checking the SIMS link is updating students (10mins)
Setting up Clubs and chargeable sessions (10 mins)
Managing Gift Aid in PFM (40mins)
Invoicing (10 mins)
Inbuilt Online Payments system (20min)
Linking with ParentPay (5 mins)
Reconciling ParentPay payments (10 mins)
Linking with Sims Agora (13 mins)
Writing emails and letters from PFM (7 mins)
Which report do I need? an overview of the reports (20 mins)
Writing your own reports (25 mins)
For onsite assistance we come to your school and help with anything needed - often coming to close down PFM for year end with/for you.
This can be really time saving as we can track down any discrepancies or imbalances, run reports, close the year, delete old codes, import new students etc.
We can also arrange onsite visits to help you catch up if a little behind, complete tricky reconciliations especially with online payments, train new staff, sort out complicated issues and so on.
All onsite visits are for a half-day (4 hours) and cost £495 all inclusive. Click here to book.
Online Year End Close Down
If you have a fairly straightforward PFM system, we can offer an online year end closedown, where we remote in and complete the year end process, printing reports, clearing accounts etc. You can sit and watch as we do this following the year end notes or just leave us to it!
This is suitable for simple close downs and costs £99 for one hour. If the situation is more complex and likely to take longer, we will let you know before continuing.
PFM Assistance at your school
PFM MOT
The PFM MOT is a service to help schools tidy up, speed up, sort out, clean out or restructure their Private Funds Manager software.
Some of you have systems that have been in school for many years and have systems that are full of old data. Some of this information is no longer valid or needed, and some is slowing everything down.
On this session we can help you give the PFM an MOT which might mean restructuring PFM to be used in a different, perhaps easier way.
Why have the MOT?
· If your system tend to be a bit slow and has lots of old information
· If it was historically set up in a way you would prefer to change – eg the structure of the short code or the way student payments are handled.
· If the online payments link is long winded or difficult to manage – we’ll help you to see if there is an easier way to manage it
· If you have lots of unreconciled items that really need to go – we can work our why they are there, and show you how to get rid of them appropriately
· Balance sheet out of balance – this will become a problem at year end, so best to address it straight away to locate the cause, and affect a correction.
· If you have lots of old pupil and parent data, it could mean a non-compliance with GDPR. We’ll help you see what is being held, and use the GDPR tools to remove appropriate data fields.
· If you are on an old version of PFM, and would like to upgrade and be shown the newer features.
How it works
The PFM MOT is a one-hour session provide remotely through the internet. We will remote in so we can look at your screen with you, as if we were sat beside you. We can then look through at the areas of interest and come up with a solution for each. Most things can be fixed or changed on the session, but if it is a substantial task eg hundreds of unreconciled items to clear off, we will talk through and then email you full instructions on how to complete this.
When?
We can do this session whenever suits you – so maybe sometime before the summer break or maybe it’s too hectic for that and sometime over the summer holiday would be better.
Cost
This one hour session costs £99 for any school with a PFM Annual Licence.