Case Study Cost Calculator (Early Help Team Islington)

We recently designed a bespoke Cost Calculator to meet the needs of Islington Council's Early Help service who needed to demonstrate service productivity, positive family outcomes and value for money locally.  The DCLG national tool did not meet their needs (does not enable individual families to be input to produce family level and caseload reporting, or adding of real local costs etc.) and so we created a bespoke tool to include the:

• Ability to demonstrate cost savings using both national and local data (where available) and with the ability to add/amend data sets as required to ensure flexibility to use with a number of services.
• Ability to demonstrate additional savings and value for money on a range of data such as rent arrears, reducing other debts and reduction in benefit claims.
• Ability to identify and produce reports on individual cases as well as multiple families accessing the service.
• Ability to show breakdown of operational costs and for user to be able to change as required.
• Ability to attach case studies or other data so case or service information can be filed together.
• Ability to export data into separate spread sheets for organising data into sub sets, producing pivot tables and graphs.

We also produced a bespoke guidance manual for using the calculator and training for the team.  We worked flexibly with Islington Council to tailor content, design and functionality as the work progressed, ensuring time to make revisions and amendments.

We are now supporting Islington with an evaluation of their Early Help service to support local decision making and this tool is being used to estimate the costs and predicted savings of delivering interventions to families.