Co-investment report - % collected

Oh, this is very interesting. I've told the tale many times of one of my learners who had £0.00008 outstanding where the completion payment was not released (must be three or four years ago now), so if your completion payments have come through then it sounds like they've put something in place to stop nonsense like this happening! If it's been released then I'm pretty sure they won't take it back... Would be nice if they actually told us about changes like this though, even where it only affects a handful of weird records...

(I mean, it would be nice if all the calculations were only done to two decimal places but, in lieu of that...)

I've raised it as a query with ESFA Customer Service - will let you know the response, when I get one

We have a bunch of those too, and I just assumed they were ok given there was no money showing owing, and we had received the completion payment. 

But given the examples from Steve H and I think in the past part of an LSECT (when they were LSECT) seminar about issues with these parts of pennies I'm now very interested in what they say.

Mine was super specific, in that the tiny amount had been created by switching the small employer flag on and off a couple of times (don't ask...), so there wasn't *any* contribution at all, maybe it's just more sensible when there is a contribution?

Thank you for responding to my query - this is the answer I have received from the Customer Help Portal. Think I will be saving that response to quote back at them if needed.

Sometimes we experience issues with the rounding of decimals. As a result we have applied a tolerance where the value is 99.9%.  We are continuing to investigate a method for ensuring both reports match.

Caroline Hudson 

That is very good to hear, and corresponds with what we see in the report.

Thank you so much for sharing.

This tolerance is all well and good at 99.99% but looking at our co-investment report, we have some % at 99.5 or even slightly less because the contribution collected columns do not have decimals when they should so the % are being calculated wrong. For one learner it results in a difference of £3.67 - this is co-investment that has been collected and recorded but the report isn't picking up.
Has anyone else got this in their reports? I have double-checked several learners on our LMS and the PMR's recorded have decimals so is this an issue with the co-investment report? Will raise with the help desk and report back.

EDIT: Raised with helpdesk, as usual technical team and 10 working days - so likely to miss this ILR window which means completed learners won't have completion payments :(

Chris Currie How are you recording PMR with decimals? The ILR spec says it has to be an integer:

We physically can't record decimals in our system, we have to round up/down. If you are including decimals, maybe somewhere they're being rounded down, perhaps check your raw xml to see what's in there.

We actually never invoice in pence anyway, we always round the invoices up to the nearest pound. That's only usually an issue when we're dealing with insufficient funds which can result in odd amounts. We do then round down in later months if it balances out. That way, we're never below the required Contribution %. Refunds are similar, we round those down to the nearest pound so we don't accidentally underclaim the 5%. 

None of this is in any guidance (except the financial records have to be whole numbers), you just have to learn the hard way 😕

Would strongly advise ALWAYS ROUNDING UP PMR records because of this nonsense... Sounds like the LMS is taking the decimals out  when it creates the ILR which will be what is doing you (would advise talking to your supplier about that...).

Thanks Ruth Canham-James & Steve Hewitt for your advice. I have begun to input all PMR records as rounded up! Begs the question why on earth the monthly contributions to collect values in the co-investment report are in decimals then! Certainly worth pointing out to LMS provider as you say Steve Hewitt. Thanks again both :D

A question we've been asking since 2017 to be quite honest with you...

We don't very often use the monthly contributions report except to find which levy payers have fallen into insufficient funds. Those amounts are nearly always in odd pence. We round up to the nearest pound some months, but when the rounding ups get enough, we then round some later ones down, we just make sure it balances in the end. I have to keep a whole tracker for that job.

I may be a little laissez-faire about this, but, personally, would just round up and then explain to an auditor why...