U.K. Council Saves £150,000 a Year with QlikView for Budget Reports

Peterborough City Council was facing a multitude of challenges in generating budget information. The council relied on a multitude of reports generated from Oracle and other financial reporting software to produce budget comparison reports (BCR) and key performance indicator (KPI) information. This often involved extensive manual manipulation of data in Excel to derive required outputs. Managers were also frustrated by the inability to report and analyse data in a single format. In addition, the council experienced delays in accessing BCR information and it was increasingly cumbersome to drill down into the data to provide individual budget holders information relevant to their roles. A critical weakness was that BCR information was only available at month end making it difficult to analyse and provide forecasts of any variations in actual as against projected expenditure. Finally, at a time of national constraint in public sector spending it was a major challenge to extract and manipulate procurement data to identify potential efficiency savings and create adequate mechanisms for accruals.

Peterborough City Council is a unitary local government authority in the United Kingdom delivering high quality public services to around 175,000 people. The authority employs 6,500 staff and has an annual budget of around £217 million (2009-2010). It is making major efficiency savings to meet stringent government targets for reduced spending in the public sector. The council's core funding from central government of £110 million in the 2010-2011 financial year has been reduced by £12 million in 2011-2012 which will rise to a cut of £24 million in 2014-2015.