Building a funding map for your college

A funding map is one page per income stream. For each one it answers five questions.

• Where does the money come from?
• How is the amount decided?
• What do we have to do to earn it?
• When is it settled, and can we still change it?
• What data decides it, and who owns that data?

The value of the map is in the fourth and fifth questions. Knowing that adult skills is reconciled, and roughly when the practical point of no return falls, is what turns a monthly report into a decision.

The fifth question is the one most colleges cannot answer. Naming an owner outside MIS for each funding-critical data item is usually the single most valuable output of the exercise.

For each stream record: the funding model used in the ILR, the source version of the funding rules and the rates document, the allocation basis, the reconciliation arrangement and any tolerance, the funding reports used to evidence earnings, and the ILR fields that materially drive the calculation.

Keeping the map against source versions rather than against remembered rules means it can be refreshed when a document is reissued rather than rewritten.

Different streams settle at different times, and some are decided long before the year they pay for.

The most important thing to know is which of your income is decided by a return rather than by delivery.

16 to 19 income for a year is built from data returned in an earlier year, so the December return is effectively the moment next year's income is set. Nothing you do in the spring changes it.

Adult skills income is earned in year against an allocation and reconciled. Under-delivery identified in June can sometimes still be addressed; under-delivery identified in September cannot.

Apprenticeship income depends on employer agreements and on the ILR matching the apprenticeship service, so a reconciliation problem is a cash problem immediately, not at year end.

Lagged allocation methodologies mean the data return that sets the allocation, and the year the allocation is paid in, are different years. Reconciling the allocation statement to the return it was built from is the check that catches an error before it becomes a budget.

For in-year reconciled streams, the practical decision point is normally the return used as the basis of the year-end claim, because after it delivery cannot be materially changed.

The last column of the funding map is the one most colleges cannot fill in: who owns the data that decides this income.

Almost always the answer is somebody outside MIS, and almost always they do not know it.

Planned hours are owned by curriculum, because curriculum decides and timetables them. Home addresses are owned by registry, because registry captures them. Leaving dates are owned by the course team, because they are the only people who know when a learner actually stopped coming. Results are owned by curriculum and quality.

MIS owns the generation, the validation and the submission. It does not own the facts, and asking it to be accountable for their accuracy is asking it to be accountable for other people's processes.

Naming the owner changes the conversation. A data quality report addressed to MIS produces effort. The same report addressed to the named owner of each item produces change.

This is usually the single most useful output of building a funding map, and it costs nothing but a conversation.

For each stream, list the ILR fields that materially drive the calculation, and against each one record the operational process that populates it and the person accountable for that process.

Report data quality measures by owner rather than in total. The distribution is almost always uneven, and the uneven part is where the improvement is.