28/03/2023
Admin cost-saving tips for schools with Edulink One
Maximise your budget
In the daily struggle to manage school budgets, it’s tough to find savings. Most secondary schools save c. £10-12k a year on printing, SMS, software and admin bills in one fell swoop using Edulink One.
Read our tips to check if your school is making the most of the system and getting maximum admin cost savings.
How much could your school save?
1. Check you’re not paying for software you don’t need.
Many schools initially buy Edulink One to solve one or two challenges and don’t roll out all the available functionality. Further down the line, additional solutions are needed to solve different problems, but the additional functions are forgotten about because they are switched off if not in use. Edulink One has so much functionality, you may be inadvertently be paying for additional software that may no longer be needed. Are you making use of:
- Parents evenings (with or without video calls)
- Room and resource bookings
- Data collection for onboarding new intakes as well as annual updates
- Clubs management with attendance tracking
- Rewards and sanctions management
- Homework system
- Taking registers remotely
- Seating plans
- Messaging
Get in touch with our Support Team if you want to chat through your set up and how you can roll out additional functions. There’s no additional cost and you may be able to make some additional savings.
2. Consider using a more cost-effective SMS provider
After you’ve turned on in-app and email notifications, which are free, you may find that you still need to use costly SMS messages. Most software providers charge you somewhere between 3.5p and 5p per SMS message, often requiring you to buy bulk bundles up front to get the best rates. Some schools also want parents to be able to reply to SMS messages (more costly) but for others, it’s not important.
Edulink One links with a range of different SMS providers including GOV.UK Notify, ClickSend and Teachers2Parents. This allows you to choose the right provider for your school and benefit from lower SMS costs at around 2p-4p per message – with no further charges for using Edulink One.
If you only want to send one-way messages via SMS messages, GOV.UK Notify is a cost-effective option and Edulink One is one of the only systems that links with it. Currently (pricing from April 2023) there are 10,000 free text messages per year for state funded schools and an additional cost of 1.97p per message over the allowance. Full pricing details are here. However, please be aware that GOV.UK Notify does review its service and pricing every so often – it’s worth bearing this in mind when evaluating different SMS providers. Our team will be happy to help you with any questions.
3. Share school reports, permission slips, letters, timetables and newsletters online.
Moving away from paper-based school reports and forms with Edulink One also saves money. An average secondary school spends £60k per year on photocopying and uses 1 million sheets of paper according to Office Copiers. And that was before the price of paper went up this year!
Imagine how much you could save if you didn’t have to print school reports, timetables, newsletters, data and permissions forms?
4. Collect and update data online
The annual data collection update can be a nightmare. Dog-eaten forms, handwriting to interpret and manually updating the system. Not to mention the number of staff hours spent on it.
Reduce time and paper by moving collection of data online via the Edulink One app. Parents and carers can update their records at any time during the year as well – all you have to do is click to accept the change to the record. You can also use it to onboard your new admissions when you get your data file in March, so parents can be engaged at an early stage.
Learn how here.
Could your school make extra admin cost savings?
Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it?
But when you sign up to Edulink One, you get access to all the functionality, whether you use it or not. If you decide to roll out a new element, or we add new function, it’s at no additional cost.
So make sure you’re up-to-date on Edulink One’s capabilities and ensure you maximise any admin cost savings.
Check out our Knowledge Hub for technical support or our ‘how to’ videos on YouTube.
Alternatively, talk to us to see how we can save you money, whether you’ve got Edulink One already or you’re new to our software.
Give us a call on 01604 807545 or drop us a line using the form below.
You can check out our latest pricing here for comparison.
