User guide

The Better Off Calculator provides expert budgeting advice, automatically applying adjustments based on the user and creating visuals to help clients and advisors understand spending.

The budgeting feature is an easy to use tool to model expenditure and help clients understand their spending. Graphs show the percentage of where spending is going as well as comparing income with costs so it can be clearly seen if there’s a shortfall.

Additional applications for support funds can be included in an organisation’s calculator. For example, Anglian Water customers who are eligible for social tariffs will see an application button on the results page for water bill support.

We’re working with a number of organisations who will accept applications for their support schemes directly from the calculator. This is greatly helping to improve access to support as users don’t need to enter their information again!

Current direct applications include water and energy support with local welfare assistance, household support fund and other council schemes coming soon.

If you offer support, get in touch if you’d like to improve the administration for your team and application journey for your customers.

You can also find grants via the calculator thanks to our partnership with Lightning Reach. Again, users can apply for grants without filling in multiple forms. Get in touch if you’d like this feature for your calculator to help people find and apply for extra grants.

Universal Credit monthly assessments can create uncertainty for claimants that receive variable income. The Better Off Calculator shows the next Universal Credit (UC) payment award based on income received in that month.

To trigger the Next Universal Credit Payment section, simply input the payment frequency on the Income and earnings page. If you input a frequency that is not monthly, the Next Universal Credit Payment section will appear on the results page.

If Universal Credit is already being claimed, the calculator will ask what date the user’s assessment period starts, which is important for calculating next month’s award.

It will ask for the dates when payments were last received for any income that isn’t received monthly. This ensures that the next Universal Credit payment is calculated correctly.

A calendar of future payments will also be shown. You can let the calculator use the information you’ve already provided for this money, or you can manually enter expected future earnings. Using this information, the calculator then models how Universal Credit payments will change depending on income during each future assessment period.

Below is an example of someone who is paid weekly. Their Universal Credit payment changes depending on how many pay checks they received within their assessment period.

For those on variable incomes that need to create a budget and financially plan, it’s an essential tool.

Add new users

Managers can add new users to an organisation’s licence individually or in bulk.

• To add users individually click on ‘Manage Users’ and ‘Add new’, which will open up a window that allows the manager to fill in the details about a user.

If there is a team structure in place, remember to refer to the team roles and permissions details below to make sure you give users the correct permissions. It is not necessary to add users to every layer. For example, if the user is a manager of multiple teams in Layer 3, it is only necessary to add details for Layer 1 and Layer 2.

• To add users in bulk, click on ‘Manager User’ and download the CSV template, add the details of the users. Then use the ‘Import via CSV’ function to add the users.

A list of users, their teams and roles can also be found under the bulk actions button.

Each organisation has an agreed a number of user licences in its subscription. If more licences are required, please get in touch with your Policy in Practice Account Manager them or email helpdesk@policyinpractice.co.uk.

Edit users

To edit a user’s details, click on ‘Manage Users’ and click on the individual user’s name and email address. This will open a window where details can be updated as required, including name, email, layer/team and role.

Deactivate users

To deactivate a user, click on ‘Manage Users’ and click on the red button on the right.

You will be offered the option to keep the user’s cases in your organisation by transferring them to your account. (This option is selected by default.)

Roles

Different roles can be allocated to each person who uses the Better Off Calculator. This ensures only specific individuals (for example, team leaders) are able to access certain cases and features of the calculator, such as creating new accounts or tracking usage.

There are four different types of user roles:

1. Administrator: Project leads, points of contact within the organisation
2. Managers: Members responsible for the calculator within a team
3. Advisors: General users of the software
4. Restricted advisor: General users who can only see their own cases.

Each user role has different types of access to features as shown below.

Teams

Managers may want to monitor usage across different teams, limit access to calculator records between teams, or ensure data is segregated and protected appropriately.

The Better Off Calculator allows managers to customise a hierarchical team management structure. This helps to replicate your organisational structure within the calculator’s management reporting systems. It also ensures effective data segregation and lets you track usage across the organisation by teams and individual advisors. An example of an organisation’s team structure is shown below.

If you would like to set up different teams in the Better Off Calculator, please contact your Account Manager or email helpdesk@policyinpractice.co.uk.

Administrators and managers can see insights about their teams’ usage and impact. These reports are available in the the ‘Management and Reporting’ menu at the top of the screen.

View the total benefits identified for your clients broken down by the number of people and the value for those that are new to claiming benefits.

It will also provide an overview of your organisation’s calculator usage, giving greater insight into the population that you’re supporting. It can be filtered by date, age, housing situation, number of children in the household as well as high level vulnerabilities.

Please click ‘Apply filters’ if you make changes. Large date ranges may need a little time to load.

You can filter by demographic characteristics to see the number of people eligible for different benefits and the average household budget.

The option to download the csv of your records is also on the Impact report page.

A user’s report will show a list of your organisation’s calculator users and the number of cases they opened over a defined period. This is available as a PDF or CSV/excel file download.

The report will provide the following information:

• Email: User email address
• Status: User’s status i.e. Deactivated, Inactive or Active
• Last activity: When user last logged in
• Total: Total of new and opened cases
• New: Number of times a new case was started
• Opened: Number of times a saved case was opened
• Assessments: Number of times a case reached the results tab

If fields are blank, the user has no activity in the selected date range.

This option allows an admin user to download the details of all the cases that have been created by users over a defined period.

By default, the records consist of a subset of the most useful inputs and outputs. For each saved case, there is information about when the case was created, household information (age, number of children, housing costs) and the amount of benefits each household is eligible for. It is also possible to view all inputs and outputs.

This report will be emailed to you to download from your associated email address. If you have a lot of records to download, this may take a few minutes to arrive in your inbox.