How Bromcom helped Penns Primary School manage their MIS and Finance in the Cloud

Background

Located in Sutton Coldfield, Penns Primary School is proud to have creative, conscientious and enthusiastic staff who strive to make every child’s education a happy and fulfilling experience. However, the headteacher and the management team found the school’s legacy management information system to be unsuitable for their needs, which prompted them to explore other options. Harry Mall – Business Manager, and her management team evaluated several cloud-based systems before making their decision.

Why Bromcom

The Penns Primary school team decided to move to Bromcom as they found it easy to use and – importantly – it had an all-inclusive and fully integrated Finance package. Aspects of the Bromcom offering which were especially useful for staff included:

• The ability to communicate with different groups of parents, or individual parents, at the click of a button
• The ‘My Child at School’ portal, which enabled extremely smooth planning of parents evening
• The impressive support provided by Bromcom, which was available via email and phone.
• Bromcom’s support portal, which enabled the school to log in and access training resources whenever required
• Additional functionality that retained similarities to the legacy system, making it familiar to end users

Finance

Bromcom’s Integrated Finance solution has proven to be a game changer for schools across the country, and when Penns Primary were looking at options its benefits stood out. They wanted a system that provided increased financial control across the board, and functionality such as online payments and the ability to post invoices and get reports, which had not been possible with their previous system.

Following Penns Primary’s switch to Bromcom, we caught up with them to find out how they have benefited from their new cloud Finance system.

Q – Which features or factors about Bromcom Finance appealed to you the most? 

A – What we like most about Bromcom Finance is that is easy to use and is integrated with the MIS System, meaning we have everything in one place. The navigation is easy to work out and everything is laid out conveniently. 

Q – Since using Bromcom Finance, what are the tangible advantages and benefits your school have experienced? 

A – Since using Bromcom Finance, our financial control is much better all round. We have a clearer picture of what is going on and can quickly trace transactions back to the source. Obviously where it is integrated with our MIS as well, we know that the data is accurate and we don’t need to use another system for Finance.

Q – How did your previous Finance solution/product compare to Bromcom Finance? 

A – The previous system was outdated and very difficult to use. The lack of functionality and flexibility are what drove us to seek an alternative solution, which is when we landed on Bromcom.

Q – How supported did you feel during the Finance training and implementation processes? 

A – We felt very supported. We had very good training and support from Bromcom, specifically Janine Prosser, who I know I can contact if I ever have questions. The training showed me everything I need to get started, and I am now totally self sufficient having used the system every day for around a year now. 

Conclusion

The ease of use, support, and all-inclusive Finance package were the primary factors that influenced Penn School’s decision to choose Bromcom. And following a successful switch to Bromcom MIS and Finance, Harry’s team have found it to be a vast improvement over the previous system.

The school were able to transition from their previous provider to online payments, which has been a great convenience for parents. School staff can now easily access the reports they need, and the user interface is intuitive, making it easy to complete tasks. Harry says that her team is happy with the results and would not hesitate to recommend Bromcom to other schools.