IMP Software has officially launched IMP Finance, a new financial management platform built from the ground up around the distinctive requirements of education finance teams in further education (FE) colleges, multi-academy trusts (MATs), and independent schools.
Available now, IMP Finance is designed to tackle one of the most persistent frustrations for education finance teams: the disconnect between budgets and actuals that can turn month-end into a lengthy exercise in correcting and reclassifying transactions.
Unlike traditional finance systems, IMP Finance uses a budget-led approach, with purchase orders, invoices and journals posting against the budget rather than being coded independently against nominal accounts. This means actuals land in the right place first time, giving finance teams across the education sector a clearer view of performance throughout the month and helping turn month-end from a process of correction into one of checking.
IMP Finance is the latest addition to the IMP Unified Platform, a suite of financial planning, budgeting and management tools for the education sector. The first customers signed up ahead of this month’s release.
Built around the way trusts, schools and colleges actually operate
MATs, independent schools and FE colleges have increasingly complex financial structures, with different schools, campuses, funding streams, central teams, projects and organisational models needing to be managed within a single financial framework.
Education finance teams do not all operate the same way. Trusts can GAG pool, top slice, run centrally, devolve financial responsibility to individual schools, or combine approaches. Independent schools can run as a single school, a group, or as part of a foundation. Colleges can run single-site or across multiple campuses. Importantly, IMP Finance flexes to each.
Every transaction can also carry multiple dimensions of analysis, allowing finance teams to report across schools or campuses, departments, activities, projects, funds and individual staff members without rekeying information or maintaining parallel spreadsheets.
Will Jordan, Co-founder and CEO of IMP Software, said:
“IMP Finance has launched as the first finance platform built for the education sector from day one, not a system that has been adapted from corporate finance tools. Every button, every feature, every report, every workflow, every automation has been designed specifically for education. Education finance teams need flexibility to deal with complexities that are natural within them. But equally, they don’t need things they don’t need, for example stock control or multicurrency, functionality that sits there in mid-market systems. We’ve built it from the ground up, so you get the depth that gives you what you want without the complexity of having to maintain it and keep it alive.”
From budget to transaction, with accuracy built in
At the heart of IMP Finance is its budget-led posting model. Rather than forcing finance teams to reconcile budgets and actuals after transactions have been processed, coding is inherited from the budget and follows the transaction all the way through.
Finance teams see what is left against every budget line on any day of the month, not just at month-end. Reclassifications and manual corrections drop away, and month-end becomes checking rather than correcting.
The platform also includes multi-dimensional reporting, drill-down from any summary figure to the underlying transaction, full audit trails showing who did what and against which budget, and configurable approval workflows for payment runs, journals, VAT return postings and period close adjustments.
Open Banking feeds and one-to-many matching bring every account a trust, school or college runs into a single screen for reconciliation. Payment runs flex to the structure: a school, a hub or a whole trust; a single account, school or ledger; a campus, a site or one account at a time. Approvals sit inside the run, BACS files and remittances are generated from it, and direct debit suppliers can be excluded automatically so nothing is paid twice.
VAT treatment can be set at finance-code level, so every transaction carries the right treatment from the point it is posted rather than being corrected at return time. For trusts, IMP Finance handles both VAT 100 and VAT 126, with Making Tax Digital-compliant VAT 100 submission and a ready-to-submit VAT 126 refund claim. For independent schools, standard, reduced, exempt and zero-rated codes are applied automatically by nominal, with clearly coded data the school applies its own partial exemption method to.
Trusts, schools and colleges can begin the new financial year before the previous one has been formally closed, while completed year-end information stays fixed once signed off.
“IMP Finance is fundamentally about taking the complexity out of financial management without taking away the flexibility trusts, schools and colleges need,” Will commented. “The underlying principle is the same across education: finance teams should be able to trust the data they are looking at, rather than spending their time fixing it.”
With 34 IMP customers going live this month and 125 trusts and well over 1,000 schools already signed up to IMP Finance, education finance leaders have pointed to the platform’s expected impact:
“Having successfully implemented IMP Planner at a previous trust, I already had a high level of confidence in IMP Software and its approach,” said Dan Bresnahan, Chief Finance and Operations Officer at The Bluebell MAT. “The software is intuitive, efficient and constantly improving. Most importantly, IMP genuinely listens to its customers and uses their feedback to shape product development, giving us confidence that the platform will continue to evolve alongside our needs and the continually evolving academy trust sector.”
Dan added:
“IMP Finance will transform many of our day-to-day finance processes. The team will benefit from faster approvals, easier access to information and better reporting. Ultimately, it will free up valuable time that can be redirected towards supporting our schools and improving outcomes for pupils.”