Software package and information systems

Description

Prior Information Notice — PIN. Service Charge Management Tool. The purpose of this Prior Information Notice (PIN) is to alert the market that Curo Group is preparing a tender exercise for the Provision of a Service Charge Management Tool in the near future and would like to invite potential service providers to participate in a soft market testing exercise. Service Charge Management Tool. Curo is a not-for-profit housing and support organisation based in Bath providing affordable homes and high quality care and support services across the West of England. We manage nearly 13 000 homes in a mix of tenures and are building hundreds of new homes every year. We are considering options for a tool to help manage Service Charges more effectively that will interface with our current housing management system (QLx) and Electronic Document Management tool (Documotive). Key requirements. Block, property, apportionment and related financial data: — Ability to access all block, apportionment, general ledger, property and tenant information in QL; — Ability to access all costs relating to blocks and properties; — Ability to record against costs at block level why they are as they are in any given year; — Ability to see the apportionment for every block; — Ability to select / de-select units for the purposes of charges at individual service level; — Ability to set up specific types of rules for the following: — tenures — blocks — charges — apportionments — cost allocation — cost recovery — service charge boundaries — other types of block groupings (eg for grounds maintenance, the ability to set up budgets, monitor and report on them at block level) — Ability to set up rules for managing expenditure, as follows: — generic rules: eg RPI, inflation increases in charges for individual services — rules at block level: to be able to manage exceptions and override generic rules — Ability to see Service Charge Boundaries and how they relate to GIS maps. Budget management: — Ability to automate accruals and pre-payments — Ability to flag potential overspends to service budget owners before they happen. — Ability to generate budgets for the following Financial year based on the rules for the previous Financial year's expenditure in a test environment to enable review and validation with service budget holders — Ability to carry out ‘what if’ modelling without impacting live data (eg in a test environment) — Ability to make changes to rules / unit / block / FY services budgets based on feedback from service budget holders. — Ability to send customers a proposed Service Charge budget in November. — Ability to produce a revised FY service budget. — Ability to review budget expenditure on a regular basis and ad hoc, at scheme, block and individual level — Ability to manage unrecoverable elements — Ability to manage depreciation of equipment — A budget setting and reconciliation process that can easily deal with changes. eg. Service Charge caps, customer feedback which requires changes, etc. Drill down and Service charge data access — Ability to make changes to charges at an individual block level in response to successful customer challenges, as authorised by Head of Finance. — Ability to access current and historic Service Charge information — Ability to drill down on charges through to costs and associated invoices in the Purchase Ledger Reconciliation. — Ability to reconcile costs vs charges. — Ability to undertake a trial reconciliation, report any anomalies (and the data underlying them) and make any adjustments at block / property level to adjust them — Ability to run a live reconciliation and lock down the figures once validated Authorisation and access controls — Ability to put in place authorisation processes for validated figures to prevent alteration / corruption of data Extracts and uploads. — Ability to generate a QLx upload of Service Charges with charge start date. — Ability to test and validate the charge upload before putting it into live QLx. Customer communications. — Ability to produce customer communications relating to Service Charges (eg letters / statements etc) in a standard format that doesn't need separate documents to be hand-matched to provide to a mailing house for mailing production and despatch. — Ability to produce easily customer documentation for Section 20 (Landlord and Tenant Act) consultation notification and mailing. — Ability to set up and easily amend in-house templates to internal corporate identity standards for: — letters — statements — invoices — credit notes — Ability to run the data to populate these templates and to create individual and batched pdfs — Ability to produce mailing files for onward secure despatch to a mailing house for mailing production — Ability to easily generate PDFs of customer information, e.g. Service Charge reconciliation statements / Sinking Fund invoices. Reporting. — Ability to set up, amend and run reports internally without the need for external support, including: — expenditure by block / street / estate vs budget — expenditure by service and against service budget — export to Excel — Ability to produce management accounts annually Sinking Funds. — Ability to calculate Sinking Funds over 3-5 years — Ability to work with an Asset Management programme to calculate 30 year plan Sinking Fund requirements — Ability to work out down to unit / block level the Sinking Fund contribution required to recover costs — Ability to create an accurate sinking fund statement as part of the reconciliation statement mailing that shows: — brought forward charges — income this year — expenditure this year — carried forward charges — Service charge / sinking fund processes / systems integrated with Major Works programme planning. — Ability to integrate Service Charge / sinking fund processes / systems with Major Works programme planning. — Ability to access audit trail reports on: — stages that key processes (e.g. reconciliations) have reached — authorisations — changes to authorised / locked down figures Section 20. — Ability to manage the end-to-end process for Section 20 consultations in the system, including the storage and management of templates and their population. — Ability to record Section 20 works / costs / timing of works / impacted blocks, as identified in service budgets. — For Section 20 consultations, ability for colleagues to view the stages / outcomes — letter sent, etc. User access — Ability to provide non-Finance colleagues with read-only access to data (preferably via QLx rather than a separate system) in order to be able to answer customer queries, including by customer: — how Service Charges are made up — the service delivered — frequency of delivery (service schedule) — timing of delivery — cost breakdown (e.g. of invoices) — Ability for high end users to access a manual / procedures documenting what needs to be done in specific circumstances (eg making a unit unrecoverable, creating a block / expense rule for a sheltered block). IT / training — Any solution will be required to interface extensively with Aareon's QL housing system and Castleton's Documotive EDM system. — Open access architecture to enable customer access to key information through a self-service portal — E-Learning support for customers and colleagues. This notice does not relate to an award of public contract. A future tendering exercise is envisaged in relation to the aforementioned supply which will be the subject of a separate OJEU Contract Notice. Note: To register your interest in this notice and obtain any additional information please visit the Curo Supplier Portal at https://in-tendhost.co.uk/curo/aspx/Home Once you have registered and expressed interest in the project, potential providers may be invited to meet with Curo to discuss the scope of the requirement and the providers solution but this cannot be guaranteed.