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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?