Employer co-investment and achievement payments

Aha, my favourite subject :)

So, what you need to do NOW is go to the R13 co-investment report, look at the Co-investment and PMRs sheet and filter Column Z, "Completion earnings in this funding year" for amounts greater than 0 and then filter Column AA, "Completion earnings in this funding year" for 0. These are your learners where the completion payment has not been released because the co-investment amount showing in the ILR is not sufficient.

You need to get those payments in the ILR by next Thursday or you will lose the Completion payment.

Word to the wise, If you are ringing up an employer this afternoon and they're paying you over the phone, would strongly recommend adding the PMR *date* as 31/7/25 as, certainly at one point, there was an issue where the calc couldn't "see" any PMRs after 31 July. I've not had a chance to see if it's still doing it but better safe than sorry.

Going forward, you (by which I mean everyone!) needs to be looking at this monthly to spot any new payments that happen to pop up (weird things can happen to people's Levy pots) as well as monitoring your non-levy contributors.

Great advice from Steve on columns Z and AA 😊 That's the priority now, but I've added some more general stuff for later. I think it is still the case that payments later than 31st July of the given year don't get counted, so you have to record as 31st July then explain if an auditor queries why it doesn't match the actual payment date.

I think it's the most difficult report I use 🙁 It's very hard to explain it all in writing. I use the "Co-investment and PMRs" sheet rather than the "Employer-level" one. Neither is great. DfE did try to adjust these but it hasn't helped. It's such a pain that it doesn't indicate levy/non-levy. Column Y sort of does, but it's not perfect.

Firstly, we track non-levy co-investment in our own MI systems. All the data we need is there to look for missing contributions, and it saves us the problem with this report, so I strongly recommend trying to do that. We also almost always collect non-levy co-investment fully up front, so that helps.

We use this report just to look for levy paying employers with insufficient funds. Once you sort any historic missing funds, you can actually start looking for insufficient funds in the Apps Monthly Payment report by filtering for levy paying rows, then looking for rows that have values in the "co-investment (below band upper limit) due from employer" columns each month.

Back in the co-investment report, I start by filtering column V for anything lower than 99. You'd think it would be 100, but we have several rows where columns S+U (total PMR so far) are at or above columns R+T (amount owed so far), but the % collected is still just below 100 for reasons I can't understand.

You can always add a column for =(S2+U2)-(R2+T2), and look for where that is a positive number (the amount still to be collected). Negative numbers are where they've already paid more than required, which happens if you take co-investment up front. With those, I grab the Ref No, and check that none of them have withdrawn. If they have, a refund is due.

Once you've got those that still owe money, if the only remaining payments due were as a result of the achievement payment, you're fine (you should still see an amount in column AA). You do still need to collect the money (auditors will check), but it won't withhold the completion payment. You then just have to work through them to see what is going on.

A big BUT, is that one row alone may look like money is owed, but there may be another row for this apprenticeship, and the two together are fine. That still throws me every time.

There's so much more too it that I can't explain easily, and I've never found a really good way of doing it. We only check quarterly (so that we're not invoicing them £1.37 each month), and it takes hours to unpick everything, then send all the info to Finance and the team that works with the employers. If definitely is easier once you sort the backlog. We have a tracker spreadsheet for the levy payers who owe us each quarter, and we can then cross check the next quarter whether they paid. Our levy employers are almost all very good at paying quickly, which really helps. 

Ah, yes, I did miss a step.

If a learner has multiple employers, they will (probably!!!) have multiple lines on the spreadsheet and the completion payment MAY NOT be on the line relating to the last employer, so check that (I basically colour in the "bad" rows I've identified above and then unfilter the spreadsheet and make sure there isn't another row above or below for the same learner that has got a completion payment).

As Ruth says, this is an absolutely painful task but, if you don't do it, you *will* be throwing money away...

Thank you all for the time taken to respond, especially at this busy time of year. Much appreciated. Your guidance has taken me straight to those learners that need to be investigated further.