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Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Multi Academy Trust: taking the pain out of managing payments
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Multi Academy Trust has transformed its payments function from a tedious and time-consuming chore to a simple and straightforward process with Lloyds Corporate Cards.
Read time: 5 mins Added: 30/01/26
The ideal solution
A job that used to take three days has been slashed to 10 minutes, thanks to a solution suggested by one school group’s Relationship Manager.
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Multi Academy Trust is a group of 36 schools across Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, including 30 primary schools and six secondary schools, with around 13,200 students aged between three and 18. It covers an incredibly diverse region of the UK, including rural and urban areas, and incorporating affluent and deprived communities.
The Trust has an annual budget of £99 million, and all day-to-day spending is overseen by management accountant Paul Kiernan. He leads a finance team which processes all payments made by schools, from payroll to annual catering contracts and one-off payments, which can be more than £1 million a week.
He said: “The Trust covers such a large geographical area that it was impractical for the centralised accounts team to monitor and manage each schools’ cash payments. So, a decision was made to seek an alternative to petty cash payments, and I approached Lloyds to come up with an alternative. We’ve had a brilliant relationship with Lloyds from day one and our Relationship Manager immediately suggested Corporate Cards as the ideal solution.”
Lloyds’ Corporate Cards provide a range of payment options for supplies, services, travel and more, to help organisations streamline their payment processes and drive efficiency, saving time and money on administration. It provides greater visibility and control over outgoings, as accounts teams know exactly what is being spent, where and who by.
Corporate Cards also mean more flexibility and convenience for cardholders. Cards are generally issued to each school’s headteacher and office manager, as well as other departments that might need one, depending on the size and complexity of the school.
Paul Kiernan Management Accountant, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Multi Academy TrustYou can manage the cards carefully, including applying spending limits and restricting their use to certain suppliers. We started seeing the benefits from day one. Any cardholder that needed to make a purchase could just go out and do it, without having to run it past us or get permission first.
Quick, simple, flexible
Paul added: “The cards have proved particularly useful for buying supplies from supermarkets, such as food and drink for breakfast clubs and after school clubs, where invoicing is not an option. And if they need to buy something that would exceed the spending limit on their card, like booking travel for a school trip, it’s very quick and simple for us to change the limit on the card, as the system is very flexible.”
And Paul says that, as soon as he was shown how the Lloyds Commercial Card Data Management platform enabled cards to be managed online, providing an overview of balances, statements, outstanding authorisations and card spend, he realised it was exactly the solution his team had been crying out for. Crucially, automated VAT compliant reporting and online expense management have transformed the monthly reconciliation process from a tedious, time-consuming chore to a quick and simple assignment.
He said: “Straight away, it was a no brainer. Before we had Corporate Cards, we had to individually download each school’s bank statement and send them over. Schools had to manually fill in a return covering everything they spent, with codes for different expenses. Each statement then had to be approved, with individual payments manually keyed in by the accounts team. It was a very clunky system that could easily get backed up. What used to take three days of processing every month has now become a 10-minute job, making life an awful lot easier and less stressful.”
A streamlined approach
As well as saving time on coding, receipt collection and reconciliation, Corporate Cards also allow the Trust to make larger supplier payments, boosting working capital and meaning cash can be held in an interest-bearing account for longer.
The next step is to consider implementing virtual cards, which will provide even greater control at the pre-payment stage, enabling the Trust to make large payments to regular suppliers.
Alexander Hill Relationship Manager, Commercial Cards, LloydsThe Trust now has a more streamlined approach to managing its Corporate Cards, as well as greater control over reconciliation and receipt collection. It has meant the Trust can move to a single account settlement, significantly reducing the number of transactions that require reconciliation and generating efficiencies for both cardholders and the finance team. This time saving allows staff to devote their time to more productive activities for the benefit of the Trust, its staff and its pupils.
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