SIMS School Finance Solutions

Maximise your financial budget

SIMS School Finance Solutions provide a comprehensive overview of your school’s finances, enabling busy finance staff to complete day-to-day financial tasks quickly.

With our ICAEW-accredited solution, you can manage your budget effectively and meet all your stakeholders' reporting requirements.

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Accurately calculate staffing costs

Automatically reconcile payments against individual members of staff, by linking SIMS School Finance Solutions with SIMS Personnel.

Save time and money on financial processes

Orders can be sent electronically via supplier portals. School invoices can be authorised and paid via BACS.

Keep track of your school equipment

Items can be assigned to a staff member or room. Detailed audit trails can be generated. Academies can establish asset registers.

Finance Next Gen

We’re building an integrated cloud-based finance solution with new functionality for Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs).

Our latest finance solution will streamline school budget management and simplify statutory reporting for all schools including LA/Maintained, Independents and MATs/school groups

Key benefits:

In the cloud - secure and flexible access anywhere, anytime
Easy to navigate - complete key tasks quicker and with less effort
Retained database structure - simple migration, no training needed and all historical data preserved
High quality integration- everything 'under one roof' in one MIS and all current interfaces retained
Understands school groups - new functionality for MATs

Finance Next Gen Reporting

Finance Next Gen Reporting is set to transform how leaders and finance teams prepare and share operational, management, and audit reports across schools and school groups. It will significantly reduce the workload associated with report generation, introducing innovative features for saving and exporting data in widely used formats.

Key benefits for all schools:

Cloud-based - flexible, secure, anytime, anywhere access
Export in popular file formats – XLS and CSV. Improved formatting options for greater clarity
Efficient data access – drill down into individual reports for more information
Historic financial views – view multi-year reports in a single report
Customisation – tailor and modify reports
Data visualisation – highlight trends and visualise data with charts and graphs
Intuitive user experience

In addition, MATs will benefit from

Authorisation hierarchy - reduce bottle necks and delays in decision-making with clear authorisation hierarchy and multiple authorisers
Centrally-managed suppliers - suppliers can be centrally maintained and distributed to schools to ensure consistency in supplier data across your group or MAT
Centralised banking - enables payments and receipts for schools to be managed and reconciled centrally
Inter-school journals - recharge and/or apportion costs or income between schools within the same group/organisation

"Since we started using Finance Next Gen Reporting we have noticed the simplified navigation and modern look, as well as how easy it is to use. We are able to benefit from the new online reporting option which is a lot easier to understand and work with. We can now easily filter information within the reports as well as export all reports to all current file formats with no re-formatting required, saving valuable time. We are very happy with what we have seen from Finance Next Gen Reporting so far and we are really looking forward to seeing the Ledger code reports as new functionality is being released later in the year! "

Danny Stenhouse, Business Manager, Heygarth Primary

"I needed the confidence that everything in the system is accurate, up-to-date and centralises different figures for external reporting. SIMS FMS was the system we decided was up to the job. In fact, we trialled another system just to be sure and then we reverted back to SIMS FMS as it was the most efficient option."

School Business Manager, primary school

“We now have the ability to easily filter information within the reports as well as export all reports to all current file formats with no re-formatting required, saving valuable time.”

Danny Stenhouse, Business Manager, Heygarth Primary

That’s just the start

We’re investing £40m in SIMS Next Gen - our management information system for the cloud.

A multi-year programme of innovation which will be complete by the end of 2026.

View our roadmap to see what’s available now and what’s coming.

View roadmap

Want to learn more about SIMS FMS?

Find out how your school can start using our powerful financial management tools, let us know how you would like to be contacted and we will connect you with an expert.