Welcome to Arbor Finance!
We are very pleased to have you onboard and our team are looking forward to making Arbor Finance a success in your schools.
No doubt you will have lots of questions at this stage about what is next/what happens when and how you will be supported. Rest assured we have a tried and tested process in place and will fully support you throughout your journey. We have successfully implemented our finance platform with Local Authorities and Schools and look forward to working with you.
Before we get in touch this article will provide an overview of what's next and fill some of the gaps before we get in touch.
The Journey
As an LA Partner we will make sure you have the functional knowledge to support your schools with Arbor Finance. We know it is as much about how to resolve functional questions, as it might be about reconciling the accounts each month. You are the experts in the latter context - we will help you become Arbor Finance experts too.
Accreditation
Partner accreditation is complete approximately 12 weeks after your initial schools come onboard. Your team will have time to embed your learning and grow in confidence in supporting your schools before asking each individual to complete a short assessment, to validate the learning experience. This is the final step to becoming a fully accredited partner with Arbor Finance.
Planning and Preparation
We will begin conversations with your central team/Project Lead before we get in touch with the schools. Our Onboarding Specialists will work closely with your core team, to understand how schools organised and how they operate.
This allows us to find out what are your objectives and vision for the schools working with Arbor Finance. We will then plan the school programme accordingly. We will also use this time to help you identify the most appropriate operational framework, to reflect the LA’s reporting and financial analysis needs, so ensuring a successful transition to Arbor Finance.
If your schools are keen to get going or just want to know what is coming next please feel free to send them the support guides below (they will be shared directly from us when their onboarding begins)
How Arbor Finance will support your schools
Following the onboarding programme, Finance Leads continue to have access to articles, on line training materials and our extensive in-platform Help Centre. Once schools are live on Arbor we also run free seasonal webinars to join, (e.g end of year top tips).
Onboarding Timelines
For your schools there is a 8 week programme to onboard with Arbor Finance. We spend some time getting to know each other. Finance Leads need to do some preparation to make sure their historic data, especially contact information, is in the best possible shape.
Midway through we expect schools to be working on the training in the Training Centre. Training is a mix of self study using pre-recorded content, and Live Webinars. At these webinars our Specialist Arbor Finance Trainers will help your schools understand any local nuance in the way Arbor Finance should be applied, as well as sharing up to the minute functional developments, since we are constantly improving our platform.
Data checking
Completing a data cleanse in your current finance system ahead of your move to Arbor Finance is one of the most important actions a school can take to ensure the migration goes as smoothly as possible.
To give you an idea of how long your schools will need to dedicate to data checking (both prior to go live and after go live) see below table:
| Week | Activity | Estimated time | Notes |
| 2 | Housekeeping/Data Cleansing | 2+ hours | Chart of Accounts - do you need all codes? Contacts - do you need all contacts/have BACS details? |
| 5 | Migration | 2+ hours | Workshop and completion of Workbook. If you have done the Housekeeping, then 2 hours is ample. |
| 6 | Migration validation and sign off | 2+ hours | If data is complete, correct, validation is minimal. Once the data is in Arbor Finance, cross checking against source migration data, creating an opening position shouldn’t take too long. |
If your data is not recorded correctly in your current system, you may have a problem once your data has been moved to Arbor Finance. For example, we will migrate duplicate contacts but migration will fail if your accounts are not balancing.
Training
Training for our Partners serves two purposes. Our 3 x 4 hour sessions provide a comprehensive introduction to the functional operations, as a support team you will need to understand. Our Specialist Training Consultants use a generic database to demonstrate functionality and capabilities of the programme.
Part of the training requires your core project team to consider how Arbor framework needs to be set up for your schools. Single Entry is simpler by design. The language compared to double entry is a little different. The framework is configured to ensure that the system reports the data in a familiar way to users and still meets the statutory reporting requirements.
Migration
As an LA Partner we support your team, to support schools through their migration routines. Post training our Specialist Training Consultant will help your team prepare a test data set. This data will then be migrated, in the same manner as school data. We will host a workshop and help the team complete a migration workbook. This will be the format to follow for school migrations.
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