Our Revenues and Benefits Offer

With ever greater focus on increasing revenue collection, and reducing cost revenues and benefits is at the forefront of many of the changes currently facing local government. Greater customer focus, lower cost, higher performance, these are just some of the benefits that we have been asked to deliver within a revenue and benefits environment, and appear to be universal concerns across local authorities.

In addition, the uncertainty created by the spectre of universal credit causes concern that it may not be an area that councils want to take on right now. The reality as staff involved know is that with pressure on budgets being as it is, with Council Tax and Benefits being a key element of many customer service offerings, and with the two services being key gateway services to other services such as housing and social care, doing nothing is not an option.

Whilst all this is true, we recognise that local authorities need to demonstrate excellent value for money, and solid return on investment. Our experience in both revenues and benefits and in service transformation and process costing more widely, has taught us that whilst goals may be consistent, local context is everything and improvement work must build on existing experience and skills. It must also reflect the local reality in terms of performance, infrastructure and demographics. Whilst our experience in Revs and Bens is vital, our broader experience enables us to draw out relationships and opportunities that would be often missed by those with a purely Revs and Bens background.

As such we have developed a menu of service offerings designed to deliver results quickly and effectively, working with in house teams to transfer skills and to ensure a step-change in performance. Click on the headings for more information.

Service improvement training for revenues and benefits staff: Drawing on our experience managing in house teams, and embedding skills transfer at the heart of our work. Our service improvement training provides a thorough and practical approach to delivering improvements, with access to tools and methodologies used by the ValueAdding.com team. We have trained and mentored internal Service Improvement teams as well as Revs and Bens Officers who may be part of an Improvement Project. Read more.

Collaborative work and benchmarking: Analysis of the revenues and benefits process in relation to peers gives managers the information they need to understand current and predict future performance. Not everything can be a priority, and targeted benchmarking enables decisions to be taken on relative priorities, such as boosting income versus reducing costs. Our approach to benchmarking is pragmatic and we analyse measures such as unit costs, error rates, channel penetration and processing rates per FTE. Read More.

Health Checks: Once an awareness of performance issues becomes apparent, a service can benefit from an impartial experienced view of what the next steps are. Our fast and focussed health checks are devised specifically for the issue at hand, and can cover process, performance and system issues, whilst reviewing both internal and contracted services. Providing a clear action plan for improvement. Read More.

Transition support and critical friendship: Establishing a high performing management teams is critical to delivering excellent results – sometimes this requires some support. External assurance offers a view point independent from day-to-day concerns, providing a complementary skill set, and someone able to offer strategic challenge and insight. Our experience in managing the transition of one of the largest in-sources in revenues and benefits history makes us uniquely placed to offer this service. Whether in sourcing, outsourcing or potentially sharing services we can help you understand what the Service should look like in terms of FTE, Service Model and Delivery before embarking on the change initiative and how to ensure the Vision is delivered. Read More.

Project and Interim Management: ValueAdding.com are experienced revenues and benefits project managers, with access to the kind of specialist technical skills critical to delivering success. Our expertise allows us to deliver results directly, or through the management of in house teams dependent upon local realities, and covers all areas from service design, to system configuration through to targeted service improvement. Read More.

Full service transformation: Delivering results quickly, through a shift in performance and transformational rather than incremental change are the benefits that ValueAdding.com's experience in both revenues and benefits and transformational change offers. Our past experience includes the delivery of front office benefits processing, the establishment of specialist visiting teams and the migration of Council Tax and Benefits calls into a customer services centre. Read More.

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