Agenda item

The Committee had before it a report by the Director of Corporate Governance which requested approval for the creation of a centralised Finance Processing Team (FPT).

By way of background the report advised that the utilisation of InfoSmart functionality within administrative tasks was integral to the Finance Creditors’ work of the Council; would compliment the PECOS and eFinancials systems; and would replace the current paper processes with electronic document and record management for (1) Purchase Order Processing (POP);  (2) invoice and credit note processing (whether PECOS, POP or non POP);  (3) payment voucher processing;  (4) Batch Processing;  (5) new and amended creditors processing;  (6) internal POP;  and (7) internal invoice processing.   The report highlighted that this would only occur where the processing of the documents was through eFinancials, the main corporate financial system, and not through one of the interface feeder systems.   If an interface feeder system was to transfer to eFinancials, then there was a potential for the FPT to carry out the associated creditors processing, but this would require to be investigated separately as part of any transfer.

The report continued that in 2008/09, there were 90 staff across the Council directly involved in processing documents (this did not include staff in education establishments), and that the staff contributed between 2% and 100% of their time to undertaking the processing work.   It had been calculated that this equated to 40 full time equivalent members of staff across the organisation.   There was a concern that members of staff who contributed a lower percentage of their work to document processing may have other priorities in their work which could result in an inconsistent approach to processing being taken throughout the Council.   The report also highlighted that no training or refresher training was currently available to members of staff, therefore procedures and processes were generally passed on through word of mouth, and where small teams were involved in document processing, leave and absence tended to impact dramatically on the team’s ability to process documents.   The report advised that these teams were currently being realigned under the new Service structure.  

The report highlighted that in 2008/09, the Council paid 84% of its invoices within the statutory 30 day period, which had resulted in the Council being placed in the third quartile in comparison to the other 31 local authorities in Scotland for the Statutory Performance Indicator for prompt payment of invoices.   It was hoped through the introduction of the FPT combined with InfoSmart, the Council could be in the upper quartile for the financial year 2010/11 for this performance indicator. The leading Council in 2008/09, had recorded a percentage of 93.4%, and had adopted a centralised approach to the processing of their invoices through electronic document and records management system, similar to what was proposed in the report.

The report outlined the process for transferring staff to FPT and continued that the posts within FPT had been evaluated under the Council’s Job Evaluation process, with the Team Leader post being graded at G12 (£25,608 - £29,245) and the Processing Officer at G9 (£17,662 - £19,875).   The report advised that subsequent to the job matching process, a recruitment exercise would take place and appointments would be made for all posts within the FPT which would comprise three Team Leaders and 22 Processing Officers to undertake the functions of the team.   The team would be created using a planned and phased approach in line with the rollout of the InfoSmart and Finance Creditors project. The successful applicants would be informed of the date they would transfer to the FPT with their new job description and contract of employment.

The report concluded that the introduction of FPT would give an approximate saving in recurring salary costs of £165,583 (41%) of the total staffing costs of the estimated 40 full time equivalent who currently undertake the work, assuming that staff numbers would be reduced through voluntary severance and early retirement.

The Committee resolved:-

to support the formation of a centralised Finance Processing Team (FPT), which would be enabled by the adoption of InfoSmart functionality.