Each year the Housing Associations and Registered Social Landlords provide the local authorities with their annual rent increase lists.
The Challenge:
Annual rent increase data is usually received in February and March during the Revenues & Benefits teams’ busiest period at End of Year. Whilst simple in their nature, the volume can put a significant strain on a Benefits Team as they fight to process them before the start of the financial year. This often leads to backlogs of other work which takes time to recover from.
The Solution:
Blue and Nelson
The London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham asked us to create a digital workforce who could process the rent increases on their behalf. Within 3 weeks we had created DigiStaff that could take the data from various sources and platforms, transfer it into the correct format and process the rent increases. Within 8 weeks we had processed over 8,000 rent increases within the Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham. In terms of time, this was a saving of over 650 hours of manual processing, allowing staff to work more effectively to avoid going into the new financial year with outstanding deadlines.
Since then, we have rolled out the DigiStaff to a number of other clients and in the last 3 years we have processed over 60,000 rent increases, saving councils over 5,000 hours of processing time.
Systems available on: Capita and Civica. Coming Soon: Northgate
