Pendle Valley Academies / BG-Demo – Discovery
Callcompleted
Pendle Valley Academies · 31 Mar 2025 10:30
Discovery with Amanda Holt and Mohammed Hanif of an eleven-school trust. Priya Raman proposed Growth at £44k plus £12k implementation. Amanda said it looked doable, pending a check with finance.
What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Discovery with Amanda Holt and Mohammed Hanif of an eleven-school trust. Priya Raman proposed Growth at £44k plus £12k implementation. Amanda said it looked doable, pending a check with finance.
What happened: Amanda and Mohammed described student and staff data scattered across school systems, with finance centralised in Xero. Mohammed said board impact analysis currently takes days.
Customer view: Amanda called the idea "transformational" and expects about thirty users. They have budget for the next financial year starting in summer.
Commercial: Priya placed them on Growth, with forty users and eight connectors, at £44k a year plus £12k implementation, eight weeks to go live. Mohammed confirmed the first year as 56,000.
Watch: no order was agreed. The next step is information from Priya and a demo call in a couple of weeks.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Who was there
BG-Demo
Them
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Priya Raman to send Growth case studies, inclusions and pricing detail the same day.
- Priya Raman to schedule a demo call in a couple of weeks.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Amanda still needs to check the price with the trust's finance team.
- Several different student information systems may strain the eight-connector limit.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Growth tier fits about thirty users across trust leadership, school leads, finance and operations.
- Budget for the next financial year starting in summer supports a go-live by then.
Transcript
Priya RamanAmanda, Mohammed, hi. So today I'd just like to understand a bit about Pendle Valley: your schools, your teams, how you're using data right now, what the challenges are.
Amanda HoltSure. So Pendle Valley is eleven schools, mix of primary and secondary across East Lancashire. We're a MAT so we're trying to operate as one trust but obviously each school's still got independence.- Priya RamanAnd from a data perspective, how is that organised?
- Amanda HoltThat's where it gets messy. Each school's got its own student information system, so we've got several different platforms. Finance is centralised, that's Xero, but student and staff data is scattered across the schools.
Mohammed HanifFrom my end, I need a complete picture of the trust's financials. Right now I'm pulling data from Xero, but I'm also getting feeds from individual schools about budget spend and projections. It's disjointed.- Priya RamanSo your key pain point is getting a consolidated view of finance across all schools?
- Mohammed HanifThat, and understanding things like staff costs, catering spend. When a decision comes from the board, I need to be able to pull together impact analysis quickly. Right now that takes days.
- Priya RamanAmanda, from Operations side, what's your challenge?
- Amanda HoltSimilar thing really. I need visibility across the schools: staffing levels, absence data, student data. If I want to understand, say, which schools have the highest absence rates, or staffing levels, I'm collating spreadsheets from multiple systems.
- Priya RamanHow many people would be using something like this?
- Amanda HoltI'd say maybe thirty. Trust leadership, school leads, finance, operations, people who need to see across schools.
- Priya RamanThat's a good fit for Growth tier. Forty users, eight connectors. So you'd have your student systems, Xero, email, maybe Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and room to add more.
- Mohammed HanifAnd we'd get all that into one place?
- Priya RamanYes. One unified layer where you can ask questions across all your data at once. You'd have dashboards, search, chat, you could ask things like 'show me staff costs by school for this term' and get an answer immediately.
- Amanda HoltThat would be transformational, actually.
- Priya RamanHow quickly would you want to move if this feels right?
- Amanda HoltWe've got budget for the next financial year starting in summer. If we could get something in place by then, that would be ideal.
- Priya RamanOK. So if you decided to move now, we could be live by summer. Growth tier is forty-four thousand per annum, plus twelve thousand for implementation. Eight weeks to get live.
- Mohammed HanifThat's fifty-six thousand first year?
- Priya RamanExactly. Then forty-four thousand annually to renew.
- Amanda HoltLet me sanity-check with our finance team, but I think that's doable.
- Priya RamanGreat. What I'll do is send you over some information on Growth: case studies, what's included, pricing detail. And then we can schedule another call, maybe in a couple of weeks, to walk through a demo if it's still interesting.
- Mohammed HanifSounds good.
- Priya RamanBrilliant. I'll get that over today and we'll touch base in a couple of weeks. Cheers, both.