Administration 140: Unit 4 Update from the Future Finance Project Team – September 2024
Future Finance Project Update September 2024
Welcome to our September update. To recap, the Future Finance Project is replacing Devon County Council’s FINEST financial system, which is nearly 30 years old and certainly showing its age! Unit 4 is the chosen authority-proven integrated financial system that we will be moving to.
In our last update, we mentioned that we had come out of the design phase and were entering testing phases. This identified some areas of the project requiring more time to complete successfully, leading to a rescheduling of the go-live date for Unit 4.
We are now targeting an earliest go-live date of November 2024. This will require the successful and timely completion of a number of critical tasks. These include:
- Finalisation of the old codes to new code mapping
- Data migration of some 7 million transactions for testing
- Testing of each service’s business system integration with the Interface Hub
- Successful completion of User Acceptance Testing
- Finalisation of training materials and user training
- Final cutover data migration
The good news is the code mapping and testing data migration steps have been successfully completed. This has allowed us to re-start our user testing in parallel with the continuing the work on the Interface Hub. Preparation of training materials is also in progress with some courses already set up for future users.
Of course, there may be other challenges ahead which we will continue to work together to resolve!
As shared previously, the plan for Schools is to make this as seamless as possible by managing the new account coding structure via the Interface Hub (see system overview below). Schools work processes are still planned to remain the same and we have taken the opportunity to improve schools’ access to some reports.
You will now be able to access both the Trail Balance and Payroll reports via the Power BI link at any time of the month and use the Trial Balance to review any differences. Please see the Quick Card for how to do this and we encourage everyone to have a go. If you have questions or issues, please reach out to your Educational Finance Consultants who will be able to help.
We will continue to keep you informed as we get closer to go-live. Thank you for your continued support!