Replacing your income management system in 12 to 15 weeks

For a typical council implementation, Andrew and his team work to a 12-to-15-week timeframe.

That doesn’t mean 12 to 15 weeks of consultants working full-time on the project. Because HeyCentric starts from a proven configuration rather than a blank page, we focus our hands-on time where it adds most: understanding your set-up, tailoring the platform, and supporting you through testing and go-live. How much is needed depends on the scope and the systems involved.

The rest of the timeline gives the council space to test the system properly, work through any questions, and ensure everything is ready before go-live.

A clear example is one of our larger London borough customers.

The council’s existing contract was ending, and it decided not to renew with their previous provider. That meant there was a firm deadline from the outset.

New system projects can easily turn into a standoff. Each side arrives with its own view of how things should work; nobody is quite sure who holds which data, and time goes into deciding who is right rather than moving the project forward. That is usually where implementations lose time and money.

This project worked differently. The HeyCentric team came in with a clear view of what good looks like and how it could work in the council’s organisation. From there, the work focused on identifying what information was needed, having the right conversations, and adjusting the approach where the council’s set-up differed.

Andrew describes it as a genuine partnership:

“Their stakeholders and their project leaders all understood the problem and were all on board to help us help them to resolve their issue. And therefore, when we asked for something, it was treated with the appropriate prioritisation.”

That matters because implementation isn’t something a supplier can do in isolation. The council has decisions to make, information to provide and testing to complete. HeyCentric’s role is to make that easier: knowing which questions to ask and helping the council find the answers.

In this London borough’s case, the two teams worked as one, with a shared deadline and a shared goal.

The result was a successful go-live in less than 12 weeks.

A compressed timeline like this is possible, but it doesn’t happen automatically. It means scheduling resources on both sides around the customer’s date, which is why agreeing that date early matters.

Every council brings something different to an implementation.

Some teams have a detailed understanding of their existing systems and data. Others have inherited systems that have been in place for years, sometimes longer than the people currently responsible for them have been in their roles.

That’s not unusual, and it isn’t a problem.

“Generally, there’s not great handover between people as they move around the organisation. And because they tend to retain these systems for a number of years, you generally don’t have people who have been there since the start.”

That can make the early stages of an implementation more complicated than they look on paper. A council might know what information it needs to provide but not exactly where it sits. Or the person who originally set something up may have moved on.

This is where the implementation team’s expertise counts. They are specialists in income management and have seen most set-ups before. Even when nobody in the room has the answer to hand, they know where to look, who to ask and what the answer is likely to be. Councils don’t need every answer on day one; the team helps fill in the blanks.

In practice, that means working through the questions with the people who know the different parts of the organisation. Sometimes it means identifying the right internal contact. Sometimes it means turning a technical requirement into a straightforward question a service team can answer.

The aim isn’t only to gather what’s needed for go-live. It’s to make sure that, by the end, the council understands and owns its system, rather than relying on a supplier to explain it.

The most common cause of delay isn’t technical. Internal approvals depend on each other: security sign-off waits for a design, the design waits for data, and data access waits for sign-off.

Projects that move quickly spot those loops early and agree with their IT and governance teams how to resolve them, in the right order and with the right approvals. That doesn’t mean skipping controls. It means running them in a sequence that lets the project progress.

One advantage of working through multiple implementations is knowing what you’re looking at.

Andrew gives the example of receiving a council’s data and being able to recognise common formats and information quickly:

“Most of the time we can look at a data file, and we can immediately think, fixed-length text, APACS bank file, that’s a sort code, that’s the bank account number, that’s the amount, that’s the date. So, we’re very quickly able to pull that information and do that data analysis.”

That experience reduces the time spent answering basic questions.

The same applies to the system environment itself.

“We’ve got a gold environment already sitting there, and when we stand up a new environment, we copy all those gold templates straight in. We’re not even having to generate things from scratch; we’ve got a template there; we’ll then tailor that template to the client rather than starting and building a template…”

That gives a starting point, and the adaptation then works both ways. HeyCentric tailors the template to the council’s requirements, and the council gets a chance to revisit processes that have built up over years of working around an older system.

Think of replacing a car you’ve driven for 20 years. You’ve got used to the clutch that dips too far and the brakes that squeak. When you buy a new one, you wouldn’t ask for those quirks back just because they’re familiar.

Income management is no different. Part of the implementation team’s role is to show what a good solution looks like, then help the council decide where the system should adapt to them and where their processes should adapt to the system.

There isn’t one timeframe that applies to every council. For a standard HeyCentric implementation, 12 to 15 weeks is a realistic expectation. The London borough mentioned above shows that, when circumstances demand it and both sides are aligned, a project can be planned around a fixed date and delivered on time.

But the more important point isn’t simply the number of weeks.

Changing an income management system is a significant project for any council. Reassurance comes from knowing what the process involves, understanding where challenges are likely to appear, and having a team that has worked through them before.

That’s what experience brings to an implementation: a clearer route from the first conversation to a confident go-live, without having to work everything out for the first time. And it’s a relationship that lasts: no HeyCentric customer has ever left us for a competitor.