Aspire Schools Trust Saves Time and Gains £2.5M Budget Clarity with PLANERGY
- Company Overview
Aspire Schools Trust is a growing multi-academy trust (MAT) in Lincolnshire, overseeing both large secondary schools and small rural primaries. With £2.5 million in non-staffing costs to manage, Aspire needed a smarter way to handle purchasing across diverse sites while maintaining visibility, consistency, and control.
- Why PLANERGY
When CFO Oliver Phillips joined, he saw that the trust’s existing finance tools were overcomplicated, underused, and failing to deliver the oversight needed. PLANERGY, fully integrated with Xero for Education, offered a simple, intuitive solution to streamline procurement while keeping full financial control.
By standardizing workflows, eliminating manual tasks, and giving leaders real-time visibility, PLANERGY enabled Aspire to modernize its operations and focus resources where they matter most: in the classroom.
Key Challenges
- Existing systems like PS Financials were expensive, complex, and rarely used effectively.
- Purchasing relied heavily on paper and email chains, with staff printing, signing, scanning, and re-scanning invoices.
- Budget holders had no real-time visibility of spend, making it difficult to track commitments.
- Central finance lacked oversight of purchasing activity across schools.
- Thousands of legacy suppliers created inefficiency and missed opportunities for cost savings.
Key Benefits
- PLANERGY integrated seamlessly with Xero for Education, separating procurement from accounting while keeping visibility and control.
- Standardized, paperless workflows eliminated manual steps like printing and re-scanning, saving hours of admin time.
- Real-time dashboards gave budget holders and finance teams instant visibility of spend.
- Approval structures were streamlined and tailored to both primary and secondary schools.
- Supplier consolidation was made possible with clear data, enabling Aspire to negotiate better contracts and pricing.
The Story
Customer
Aspire Schools Trust
Key client
CFO
Industry
Education
Company Size
200+ employees
Before PLANERGY
Aspire’s finance processes were fragmented and inefficient. Staff were forced to print, barcode, and scan invoices before re-scanning and emailing them for approval.
CFO Oliver Phillips recalled, “A lot of our procurement was driven by email chains and paper. We had pockets of people bypassing systems entirely. We were flying blind.”
Budget holders had no clear way to track their spending, and the finance team struggled to pull together reports from scattered systems.
The trust was also paying for expensive finance software, but as Phillips noted, “PSF is a very expensive piece of software — but it was like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Most schools weren’t using even half of it.”
The result was wasted time, inconsistent processes, and limited financial control, making it difficult for leadership to focus on strategic procurement or cost savings.
After PLANERGY
Within weeks of implementation, Aspire Schools Trust had standardized procurement across its schools and integrated PLANERGY with Xero for Education. Supplier data was migrated, workflows were aligned, and approvals were set up to match the needs of both primary and secondary schools.
“Xero for Education is our anchor software, so whatever we added had to plug into it seamlessly. PLANERGY showed us how to separate the procurement process from the accounting side while keeping full control and visibility,” Phillips explained.
By eliminating manual steps like scanning and re-scanning invoices, PLANERGY freed up more than 16 hours of admin time per month. Those hours are now reinvested in higher-value activities like supplier management and contract negotiation.
Teachers and budget holders also benefited, with simple dashboards that gave them the clarity they needed without requiring them to be finance experts. As Phillips noted, “Teachers don’t need to know about budget codes or procurement frameworks. They just need to know: I asked for something, it’s approved, and it’s on the way. PLANERGY makes that possible.”
With real-time visibility, Aspire has begun consolidating thousands of suppliers into a leaner, more reliable vendor list. “We had over 2,000 suppliers in our system — but only used about 60. We’ve already started consolidating, and our goal is to negotiate better pricing across fewer, more reliable vendors,” Phillips said.
The trust now has the confidence to manage £2.5 million in non-staffing costs with clarity and control. “It’s allowed us to free up staff to do more valuable work — like negotiating better contracts, rather than pushing paper. And if I got hit by a mail van tomorrow, the system would carry on without me — that’s how it should be.”
Testimonials
PLANERGY isn’t just a bolt-on. It’s a fundamental part of how we work now. It’s saving us time, giving us visibility, and supporting better decisions. I’d recommend it to any MAT looking to modernize.
Oliver Phillips
CFO
Read More Education Case Studies
One platform to control and manage 100% of your company’s purchasing & payments
Trusted by the leading finance & operations teams across the world