Journal Template Consistency

Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, South East, Integrated

The problem

The finance team is struggling with inconsistent journal narratives entered by different teams, leading to time wasted on analysis and alignment. A solution is needed to ensure consistency and streamline the process.

The challenge

How might we design a standardised journal template that can be easily used by all teams to ensure consistency in journal descriptions and data entry, while also allowing for flexible data manipulation and analysis once the information is exported to the ledger?

The outputs

This produced journal narrative that all came out in a consistent manner
Clearer journal narrative as they all follow the same process and the journal template is providing a steer about what to put as the description
Being able to apply this process to budget journals too

The outcomes

Financial services were able to download one report and then use this formatted data to help populate control accounts, saving a lot of time
Management accountants can analyse transactions with ease which aids in their achievement of working day 1 closedown
Financial services can review the narratives with ease and challenge journals with less obvious descriptions to help further improve journal narratives in the future so that they are more meaningful to them and the budget holders

The Innovation

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What the peer-reviewers said

“I can see how this innovation would be very useful to analyse accruals/ adjustments.”

“It is a useful technique to capture key information and allow clear analysis of the balance sheet.”

“It’s good to have a consistent approach for the journal narrative to make it easier for reporting and less manual manipulation.”

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