Our Purpose
Relay aims to help schools and pupils thrive by making school finance reporting easy and effective.
It’s a broad vision and we know we can only play a small yet critical part in bringing this about.
Our Background
Our founders have worked in partnership with schools over many years as finance and business management consultants. These partnerships highlighted financial reporting as the most frequently identified area of support. A common source of frustration was a need for more clarity and understanding of their financial position. Typical questions were “I want to do………….for our pupils, but I’m not sure if we can afford it, “Where are we now, and where are we going financially?”
Problems with school finance reporting
There was always a range of reasons why the reporting wasn’t of a quality that could help drive the school forward. It would invariably come down to the fact that to get the correct information relayed with clarity. Then they would need to produce reports outside their accounting systems which required time and expertise.
From experiencing thousands of Governor meetings, we learned that understanding the financial reports was a clear barrier to productivity, engagement and improvement for many schools. Very often, a large proportion of meeting time and volunteer enthusiasm could have been better spent as they struggled to fully understand their school’s financial position. For many, this continues to be a source of unnecessary stress and anxiety.
Our solution
With Relay, you can easily create professional interactive budget monitoring reports and dashboards without expertise. You can share reports securely within the Relay App, designed to relay the information clearly, accurately and intuitively.
Our key feature is secure in-app messaging to facilitate a complete understanding of the information. Our interactive I&E allows users to Leave comments to help explain the differences to planned income and expenditure. Trustees or Governors can ask questions and get answers on specific numbers, budget headings or variances. These comments are then visible to all. The benefit being school staff can answer accurately, having had quality time to investigate before responding. This helps build transparency, confidence and trust between all team members and releases valuable meeting time for discussion and decision-making.
Relay also allows schools to manage risks and exploit opportunities more effectively, and leaders are empowered to make confident decisions without hesitation based on clearly communicated information. This remains a great source of fulfilment for our founders – the desire to support schools on a larger scale by making Relay accessible for everyone with undeniable value.
Create, Share and Communicate with Relay – school finance reporting made easy and effective.