Do you want to know what our biggest-selling service is? You may be surprised to hear it’s our Monitoring service – which offers clients support post them awarding Soft FM services, such as catering and cleaning, to a contractor.
We’ve recently rebranded this service to Verify in recognition that what we deliver is so much more than just monitoring what the contractor delivers.
For anyone who isn’t aware of what Verify is, it’s where we check over that the calibre of service provided and the fees charged by contractors to our clients are in line with what’s been agreed.
This service has evolved out of our original auditing service, which is what Litmus was founded on. With auditing, we checked that contractors were charging the right prices to their clients, and often we found that they weren’t.
A major part of the Verify service is where we forensically examine the data and ensure our clients are paying for the service they receive from their contractor – nothing more, nothing less.
The data provided to evaluate the contractor’s fees can be very extensive but we’ve perfected the art of simplifying that so our clients, along with the help of our Consultants, can see what they need to know at a glance and be reassured that any inaccuracies are highlighted, and the charges are correct. Still today, we recover circa. £750k on average per year of fees and charges on behalf of our clients; a significant figure, with most of that going back into the state education sector.
Our service is continually evolving to ensure we are offering our clients added value wherever possible. Over the last two years, we’ve invested in new technology and the latest reporting techniques, to harness the wealth of data we collect so that it can be used to provide new insight for our clients and our team.
For the first time ever, we can now access and share reports on how contracted services perform across different organisations in the same sector, we can compare them regionally, nationally and see how key financial and performance indicators and ratios match up. The potential this provides to assist in improved services and better cost control is significant and will enable our clients to understand what average, good and best really looks like.
Take education for example; this enables schools to see how the contracted services in similar sized and, very importantly, anonymised schools are performing financially, how students and staff perceive the calibre of the service elsewhere and what others achieve in their Free School Meal uptake and a whole lot more.
Over the next academic year, Verify will evolve further. This month sees the new style of Verify reporting go live and the start of the roll out of more web based interactive dashboards, which allow clients to manipulate the data they see without the risk of corruption.
Phil Silva, Finance Director at the Litmus Partnership, says: “We’ve always been driven by a desire to ensure best value is provided to our clients and that the partnership between us, our clients and their contracted service provider is collaborative and beneficial for all. We see the future of Verify not just benefiting our team and our clients but also being valued by our client’s contractors as Verify aims to deliver added value to them too.”
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The Litmus team