Our Benefit and Budgeting Calculator is outcome-focused and gives advisors information they can trust. They can easily explain complex benefit changes and give people the advice they need to make decisions. The calculator is free for individuals; extra features are built into our expert version for advisors, for which charges apply.
People don’t need to be policy experts to understand what changes to the welfare system mean for them
Our powerful Benefit and Budgeting Calculator is
Fast
Accurate
Simple to use
Compare calculators
Benefit calculation
- Compare income under current system and Universal Credit
- Save and download information about benefits and how to maximise income
- See which benefits couples can claim to maximise joint income
Understanding change
- See impact of change in earnings or hours on income via sliders
Help for claimants
- Get personalised benefit advice
- Get advice to maximise income
- Print a record of the case
- Click links to Find a Job
- Click links to benefit claim forms and advice
- Get support via general email helpline
REQUEST A CALL BACK
Set up a free trial, request a personalised demo, get a quote or just ask for more details. We'll call you back.
Benefit calculation
- Compare income under current system and Universal Credit
- Save and download information about benefits and how to maximise income
- See which benefits couples can claim to maximise joint income
- Calculate income for students, refugees and asylum seekers
- Forecast UC fluctuations for weekly income for next 12 months
- Forecast weekly income and total household income that falls in UC assessment periods, for next 12 months
- Auto calculate Council Tax liability based on postcode
- Auto calculate Local Housing Allowance
- Calculate localised Council Tax Support
- Allow for Council Tax exemptions, disability and single person discounts
- Manually change auto calculated values
- Include details of self employed user and partner
- Allow for pension contributions
Understanding change
- See impact of change in earnings or hours on income via sliders
- Model, save and compare changes of circumstances
Help for claimants
- Get personalised benefit advice
- Get advice to maximise income
- Print a record of the case
- Click links to Find a Job
- Click links to benefit claim forms and advice
- Get support via general email helpline
Help for advisors
- Access built in chat support
- Print a case in full or selected sections, eg budget
- Share cases with others
- Save a case and return later
- Create personalised action plans
- Create and access management information
- Customise the visual look of the interface with your branding
- Set user permission levels
- Create tailored views for individuals, team and organisation
- Print case record and select which features to include in print
- View expert hovers showing detailed breakdown of how calculations are made
Budgeting
- Access Budgeting calculator
- Compare outgoings with other similar households to help budget
- Create smart budget plans showing prioritised payments
- Calculate maximum overpayment repayments, deductions due to sanctions, advance payments and hardship awards
REQUEST A CALL BACK
Set up a free trial, request a personalised demo, get a quote or just ask for more details. We'll call you back.
When we were looking at a new benefit calculator, all of our colleagues who tested Policy in Practice's Benefit and Budgeting Calculator agreed it was the one they wanted to have – the decision was unanimous! Its ease of use and visual features will make it much easier to help our customers.
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.
Carole Kenney, Phoenix
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.
Carole Kenney, Phoenix
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?
Andy Johnson, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council
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.
You can explain benefit entitlements but people may not fully grasp the numbers. Having the Benefit and Budgeting Calculator as a mechanism to visually explain the breakdown of entitlements using colour coded charts really helps as it’s something people can relate to.
Grant Bailey, Benefit and Money Advice Team Leader, Cheltenham Borough Homes
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.
Howard Humphries, Vale of Glamorgan
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.
Marie Hardeman, The Guinness Partnership
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.
Darren Thomas, Grwp Cynefin
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.
Bill Irvine, Universal Credit Advice & Advocacy
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.
Carole Kenney, Phoenix
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.
Marise Mackie, Pluss
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.
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 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.
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.
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 unparelled expertise in simplifying the welfare system, as well as their software, allows us to deliver innovative services to jobseekers across the entire Southern region.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
