Q&A brief
The ten questions the board is most likely to ask, pitched at governance and risk, each answered from the model.
No. Cost rises +8.5% into next year on a flat establishment (82 posts, 80 FTE). The growth is rates and annualisation, not expansion, £243k committed carry-over plus £139k pay award.
£4.87m to £5.34m, a total of £15.32m, growing +4.9% then +4.6%. The drivers are the pay award and the employer-NI step in 2027/28, on a broadly static headcount.
The 3% award is £139k, roughly £46k per percentage point. It is the single largest controllable variable in the budget; every point debated at the table is about £46k.
They reconcile to the source workbook to the penny, the extract is tied to the model's own summaries as a hard gate, and the tools' arithmetic reproduces every one of the workbook's cells exactly. The audit pack runs 8 of 8 controls green. Nothing here is a parallel calculation.
You are asked to approve the staff budget and its margin impact, and to challenge it where you see fit. The role-level choices, which of 13 candidate roles across 3 scenarios to run, are an exec decision that feeds the figure in front of you; the board approves the envelope, not the individual roles, while keeping every right to send it back.
Deferrable until hired. The 13 candidate roles are uncommitted while they remain proposals. Once a permanent role is filled, though, reversing it is redundancy, not a change of mind, so approving one is a multi-year commitment. If optionality on a specific role is the goal, that is a deliberate FTC decision with its own trade-off, flexibility bought against stability and usually a higher rate, not a default escape hatch. The committed £243k carry-over is contractual and cannot be deferred without changing the establishment.
Pension take-up rising toward 8% (up to £74,623), bonus achieving above 75%, and attrition and recruitment lag which are calculated but not yet costed into any year. All are flagged in the pack rather than buried.
Yes on the checks the model runs: every living-wage-affected role is budgeted above the Real Living Wage floor, and employer NI is on the correct secondary-threshold basis. The Employment Allowance and the SMP rebate are not yet modelled, which makes the figures prudent-high, not optimistic.
It is top-heavy: A and B grades are 55.9% of cost on 23 FTE. That is the standout efficiency question, and the decision tool can model a rebalance so the board sees the effect before it is committed.
The SMP rebate (~92% reclaim), the Real Living Wage mid-year phasing, attrition costing, and the Employment Allowance. Each is documented in the audit pack with its reason. The effect of all four is to state cost prudently high, so the plan has headroom rather than hidden gaps.