Grow the financial strength of your customers

We believe that, with the right support, most people can find work and build a career. We chose to work with Policy in Practice because their unparalleled expertise in simplifying the welfare system, as well as their Benefit and Budgeting Calculator, allows us to deliver innovative services to jobseekers across the entire Southern region.

Our biggest concern, as UC rolls out across our large geographic area, was that we have consistency, that our tenants get the same service and also that our advisors have something to fall back on. Policy in Practice gives us that and we can access it from anywhere. The way that Policy in Practices deals with income entitlement, as well as the expenditure of the household, gives our advisors the confidence to have frank and honest discussions with households. Nothing speaks better to our tenants than facts and figures.

One of the reasons we have chosen Policy in Practice’s Benefit and Budgeting tool is that it allows you to see, when you put in the postcode, certain things that are available to customers, discounted wifi being one of them.

The Benefit and Budgeting Calculator makes it much quicker to do calculations and the tooltips make it easy to use, meaning we only need to train people once. The simplicity of the calculator means that clients can often self serve with little support.

The differences with this calculator, compared to others on the market, are the income assessment features that give the built in ability to maximise benefits and see the impact of working extra hours. The Universal Credit calendar feature helps us to flex payments based on fluctuating income.

The Benefit and Budgeting Calculator is invaluable to us. We use it to help the homeless find properties that are affordable and to provide the correct advice.

Income maximisation is so important, as is building a customer’s confidence and identifying additional money they may be able to claim. This is where we use the Policy in Practice Benefit and Budgeting Calculator.

The Benefit and Budgeting Calculator has enabled us to carry out over 4,000 benefit calculations. The ‘what if’ scenarios in the calculator enable us to have a conversation with someone where we can model the ‘in work’ and ‘out of work’ scenarios. It gives our tenants some certainty when they go back into the world of work, move into a new sector or take up employment in another town.

The Benefit and Budgeting Calculator is amazing, the frontline volunteers find it really useful. I especially like the calendar that shows claimants who get paid weekly how their monthly Universal Credit payments will be affected over the next 12 months.

Deven understood what our needs were and listened to how we intended to use the calculator as part of our pilot. His detailed knowledge of the current benefit system and Universal Credit, combined with his technical expertise to build online tools of this type, made him the ideal person to work with.

The software is so user friendly and there are lots of intuitive features in there which mean that an advisor doesn’t have to be a benefits expert.

The Benefit and Budgeting Calculator is different. Its outcome-based approach has been very powerful and has really helped us to change behaviour of both our residents and advisors.

We needed to look at people’s circumstances before giving more flexible payment arrangements which meant we had to make decisions about what people could afford to pay. It was very difficult for staff to be objective and consistent in their approach, which wasn’t very fair for the customer. This also made it difficult for us to explain our reasoning to our clients.

I decided Policy in Practice’s Benefit and Budgeting Calculator was something we really needed. It’s enabled us to provide a consistent approach to assessing affordability. We’ve been able to give our customers an online tool which lets them take control of their finances and liaise with us electronically, without the awkwardness or challenge sometimes faced in person.

We really encourage our new customers to use the Benefit and Budgeting Calculator to help them be independent and find out what benefits they’re entitled to. It’s been a big help to our staff, our housing team and our domestic abuse teams in particular, to double-check the advice they are giving to people.

When we were looking at a new benefit calculator, all of our colleagues who tested Policy and Practice’s Benefit and Budgeting Calculator agreed it was the one they wanted to have – the decision was unanimous! It’s ease of use and visual features will make it much easier to help our customers.

Our tenants are facing increased pressure on their budgets as a result of welfare reforms. The Benefit and Budgeting Calculator allows us to provide better income and budgeting support to our tenants.

The Policy in Practice Benefit and Budgeting Calculator is a fantastic asset for our employability teams to use with people on the Work and Health Programme. The support the Policy in Practice team have provided from start to finish has been excellent.

The software is user friendly with lots of intuitive features. Any software is only as good as its implementation and the support we’ve had from Policy in Practice has been a massive benefit.

Our advisors using the Benefit and Budgeting Calculator were 3 times more effective at getting people into work.

Staff at Elite Supported Employment find the Policy in Practice Calculator an excellent tool to provide information to our participants. The calculator is easy to use and the expert calculator breakdown tool makes the results easy to understand. Being able to print off the graph also gives our participants a visual document to refer to. It’s also great to be able to save a case, we can easily find a calculation and make any adjustments if needed, saving the time of completing a new calculation.

Policy in Practice has helped Oxford to develop a budgeting tool that helps our advisors to have better, outcome-focused conversations with our residents. They have made DHP applications more effective, as well as more efficient, reducing the dependence of our residents on discretionary housing payments.

The best thing for landlords to do is to have a small team of staff that are dedicated to getting their heads around Universal Credit so that they can give the information to their colleagues. We’ve got 4 to 5 years to get to the end of this exercise, maybe even longer. The important thing is to look at your high risk cases which are your new claims and look to support them. I recommend you do as much as you can to support your tenants because the more you invest now, the more you will actually save by avoiding problems further down the line.

I was attracted to the Benefit and Budgeting Calculator because, as one tool, [it gives us] more consistency. It’s more than just an income and expenditure calculator. I was particularly excited about the better off scenarios [that help us to] work with our customers to show them how their income may improve, or not, depending on how their circumstances change, which links heavily into the Universal Credit calculation. I also like the action plan functionality and the self service option.

As well as mitigating against the risks brought by the welfare reforms programme we also saw that there was a big chance to try and do something different, to promote opportunity.

The Benefit and Budgeting Calculator is used as a motivational tool, as what better way is there to show someone how they can improve their situation by entering employment than by seeing that big difference as a financial figure?