Staff Costs and FTE Budget, current year and three-year plan.
Two automated controls stand between the workbook and every output. Neither is optional: the pipeline cannot produce a pack unless both pass, so the existence of this pack is itself evidence they did.
Reconciliation passed Engine parity passed
| Reconciliation gate | The extract is tied back to the workbook's own summaries: FTE by cost centre and month, total FTE by month, total cost by budget year, and all 246 position-year component sums. Every check to the penny. Enforced as a hard gate. |
| Engine parity | The interactive tools recompute cost from the workbook's driver values and reproduce all 20,664 monthly component cells exactly, so no output can silently disagree with the model. |
Every figure below is the reconciled workbook total. Nothing here is a parallel calculation.
| Current year 2025/26 | Amount | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Actuals to date | £3,482,030 | periods 1 to 9 |
| Forecast | £1,007,107 | periods 10 to 12 |
| Outturn | £4,489,137 | actuals + forecast |
| Approved budget | £4,679,896 | 76 positions |
| Variance | -£190,759 | -4.1% underspend |
| Budget years | Total cost | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| 2026/27 | £4,870,487 | outturn to budget |
| 2027/28 | £5,108,281 | +4.9% on prior |
| 2028/29 | £5,343,928 | +4.6% on prior |
| Three-year total | £15,322,696 |
Read from the workbook's assumption set. Employer NI is charged on Basic, Bonus and Car Allowance above the secondary threshold of £417 per month; pension is excluded from the NI base, as it is not NICable.
| Assumption | 2026/27 | 2027/28 | 2028/29 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay award (general uplift) | 3.0% | 3.0% | 3.0% |
| Employer NI rate | 15.0% | 16.0% | 16.0% |
| DC pension (employer) | 8.0% | 8.0% | 8.0% |
| DB pension (employer) | 16.0% | 16.0% | 16.0% |
| Bonus achievement | 75.0% | 75.0% | 80.0% |
What is applied, what is not, and why. Stated plainly so a reviewer's first question already has an answer.
The two gates above run on every build. The checks below are the standing controls on the workbook, designed to catch the errors that overstate cost without ever producing an error value.
| Control | What it catches |
|---|---|
| Reconciliation gate | Extract must tie to the workbook by FTE and by cost, to the penny, or the pipeline stops. A hard gate: no output is produced otherwise. |
| Engine parity | The interactive tools recompute every position's monthly cost from the workbook's own driver values and must reproduce every cell exactly. |
| Handover double-funding | Flags a blank start date on a row sharing a Position ID with a dated leaver (a role funded twice through a handover). |
| Legacy DB on a new hire | Flags Pension Type DB on any position starting after the current year-end. |
| Establishment integrity | Flags an approved-post count that does not equal the filled count, with no explaining comment (a vacancy or an over-establishment). |
| Blended NI sanity | Checks blended employer NI as a share of NICable pay sits in a sane band (about 13.5% on the current basis). |
| Living wage floor | Flags any living-wage-affected role whose forthcoming-year full-time salary falls below the Real Living Wage floor. |
| Attribute integrity | Flags any establishment attribute (cost-centre, department, grade, group, function) resolving to blank or error. |
This pack is prepared from the workbook named above. Signing confirms the figures have been reviewed against it.