When you’re running a business of whatever size, it’s critical to know your numbers – but when you’re running the finances for 22 schools, it’s even more imperative to get your maths right.
Established in 2016, Sapientia Education Trust (SET) is responsible for more than 8,500 pupils and 1,300 staff across Norfolk and Suffolk. However, until 2022, the administration of its finances was still being done the old school way – manually – with piles of paper-based files and spreadsheets.
Steven Dewing, SET’s chief financial officer, says: “When I joined in September 2021, the team were struggling. The trust was recovering after Covid, and getting invoices paid on time and reports delivered on time was a challenge.”
The system being used by the trust was adopted back when it encompassed just five schools. By the time Dewing joined, the number of schools had risen to 15 – each with its own database and no sharing of data. “There were lots of silos.”
Dewing recalls how his deputy needed a whole day each month simply to reconcile it all, with numbers pulled out and manually put on to consolidated spreadsheets. Only then could data be manipulated into the right formats needed.
Advertisement
“That was not uncommon for finance departments,” he says, “but it is very prone to error. Also, invoices were being manually signed, requisitions were written by hand, and because we had a different system for each school, we couldn’t join these up. People physically carried around loads of paper, so it was hard to maintain compliance.”
‘Everything in one database’
All this changed in September 2022 when SET moved to a new system, Sage Intacct, which was rolled out with the support of ION, a Sage Education implementation partner.
And for a trust that includes the country’s largest state boarding school with 1,400 children alongside small, rural primary schools with as few as 16 pupils, the finance platform was a gamechanger.
The trust includes the country’s largest state boarding school
“Now we have everything in one database,” says Dewing. “Each school is still its own entity, but it’s all shared so there is no manual reconciling, it all just happens in the system.”
He adds that using Intacct has also meant SET can combine purchasing across the trust, allowing it to benefit from economies of scale and supplier discounts, while reducing the admin of having to purchase across all its schools.
Advertisement
He also highlights the platform’s ease of use and describes how having access to personalised dashboards for every user has been a massive step forward. “We used to pull out data and then email it to people,” he says, “but now depending on what level you are and what your role is, there are different dashboards. Users can go in and see information whenever they want and drill down to the transaction. It has enabled us to empower them with data they need, when they need it.”
Successful use cases for this part of the implementation include head teachers in SET’s small rural schools seeing an accurate and real-time position of their finances, with staff able to login from any location any time to study the data and reports.
“What’s good is we can pull in non-financial information too, like pupil numbers and staff numbers,” adds Dewing. “You can then combine that with other data to give cost per student, cost per staff member, and much more, without any Excel manipulation.”
Adding up the time saved with AI
Within SET’s finance department, a pool of four people is responsible for multiple schools reporting to Dewing. Below this there are others who input transactions, invoices and payments.
To ensure the department was up to speed from day one, ION provided training in Sage Intacct during the onboarding process. It offered Dewing and his colleagues a structured programme, which the CFO says was a major help given “it’s a really big bit of software with lots of different functionality”.
Advertisement
AI tools have proved to be an invaluable timesaver for processing invoices
“Having someone guide you through it and teach you what it does, while making sure you’re doing the right things at the right time, was vital,” he says. “We broke the training down into four two-hour sessions rather than one whole day and also got them to record some short videos, which we continue to use.”
Dewing has found a number of Sage Intacct’s AI-driven tools particularly useful. For instance, Outlier Detection, which automatically spots data appearing in odd patterns and suggests corrections, and Accounts Payable Automation, which uses AI to populate invoices against purchase orders.
Given that SET processes more than 25,000 invoices a year, this represents a transformational timesaver for colleagues who no longer have to input the details themselves and simply now check over the AI-prepared documents.
Dewing cites this as just one key example of how the move to Sage Intacct has revolutionised what his finance team can do for the wider trust.
“It has enabled finance to move from a pure admin function, where you carry bits of paper around and get things paid, to a strategic partner in the organisation,” he says. It’s become less about ‘have we paid this on time or have we ordered that’, because that just happens through the system.
Advertisement
“We can now spend far more time supporting people to take financial decisions and in budgeting. Sage Intacct has changed our relationships with the schools because they see what value we bring.”
Find out more about Sage Intacct and book a demo, at: sage.com
Mayer Brown is a proud sponsor of Proximo Congress 2026. This senior meeting of the US energy, infrastructure, and digital infrastructure finance community is shaped around the questions credit and investment committees are actually asking in 2026: how asset classes are converging, how risk is being priced in a recalibrated policy and geopolitical environment, and how public and private capital are being structured together to deliver projects at scale.
Mayer Brown has also been recognized for three separate awards which will be presented during the event. These awards include:
Proximo North America Transport Deal of the Year 2025 – SR 400 Peach Partners
Proximo North America Rail Deal of the Year 2025 – Brightline West
Proximo North America LNG Deal of the Year 2025 – Port Arthur LNG 2
If you have ever taken out a mortgage, you’ll know there are a lot of requirements to meet. You may need to put down a certain amount and have a debt-to-income ratio below a certain threshold. You may also run into limits on how much you can borrow or what sources of income the lender will count.
These rules do not apply to all mortgages — just to conforming mortgages, which is what the majority of borrowers take out. However, mortgage lenders are increasingly offering what are known as nonconforming loans, or mortgages that do not “comply with every one of the strict standards put in place after the housing crisis,” said The Wall Street Journal. While “still a small portion,” the “share of mortgages using alternative lending practices” has “doubled in size over the past three years.”
What are nonconforming loans?
A nonconforming mortgage is a “type of home loan that doesn’t meet some or all of the guidelines that make them eligible for purchase by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” said Bankrate. These are the government-sponsored entities that “support much of the secondary mortgage market in the U.S.,” meaning they often purchase resold mortgages.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Advertisement
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos From
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have “federal rules that limit the purchase of loans deemed relatively risk-free,” said Investopedia. Loans that meet these guidelines are conforming loans; loans that do not are nonconforming. To be a conforming loan, a mortgage must fall under a certain loan amount, and the borrower must meet specific criteria when it comes to their credit score, debt-to-income ratio and loan-to-value ratio.
Effectively, any home loan that does not align with these stipulations is considered nonconforming. Examples include jumbo loans, government-backed loans, bridge loans and interest-only loans.
Why do people get them?
There are a wide range of reasons people may opt for a nonconforming mortgage. For one, “you may have no choice but to choose a nonconforming jumbo loan if you want to buy an expensive property,” said Rocket Mortgage. These loans can also provide more flexibility when it comes to the type of property you purchase, your credit score and your down payment amount.
Advertisement
Nonconforming loans additionally “offer an opportunity for home buyers who might not otherwise qualify for traditional loans because they are self-employed or hold their wealth in assets such as real estate,” said the Journal.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
What are the drawbacks?
For starters, there are fewer lenders offering them “since they pose a higher risk to the bank or mortgage lender,” said Yahoo Finance. That said, availability can vary depending on the specific type, as “some nonconforming loans (like FHA mortgages) are common, while others (like USDA loans) can be harder to find.”
Nonconforming loans also “generally carry a higher interest rate for the borrower,” said the Journal, given the increased risk to the lender. Still, this can vary by loan type. For instance, “FHA, VA and USDA loans usually have lower interest rates,” while “less common nonconforming loans, such as bridge loans, often have higher interest rates,” said Yahoo Finance. There is also the possibility that a nonconforming loan “could have an unusual repayment schedule or other features that make it harder to repay,” said Bankrate.
What U.S. consumers ask of their credit cards has changed. For financially stressed households, it has little to do with rewards.
As more households turn to credit cards to manage liquidity and cover everyday expenses, a new set of practical concerns is driving card behavior: Can the card help avoid a missed payment? Can it make balances easier to track? Can it provide enough visibility into available credit and upcoming obligations to help manage an uncertain month?
Those concerns are beginning to reorder what consumers value most in their credit card relationships.
That evidence is clear in “Winning Top of Wallet: How Credit Card Apps Shape Choice,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Elan Credit Card report examining how consumers use mobile apps to manage spending, payments and engagement across their credit card portfolios. The report found 30% of consumers primarily use credit cards to build credit or extend purchasing power, while another 22% primarily use cards for cash flow management, together outweighing rewards-based usage.
The divide is more pronounced among financially stressed households. Among consumers living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to pay bills, 40% cited credit dependence as their primary reason for using credit cards. Just 11% pointed to rewards.
Advertisement
For a growing share of consumers, credit cards are functioning less like discretionary spending products and more like liquidity management tools.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
What Matters Most
That evolution is also changing which app features matter most.
Among cash flow-focused consumers, 31% said scheduling payments or autopay encouraged them to spend more on a card, while 27% cited alerts and reminders. Credit-motivated consumers showed similarly high engagement with tools tied to available credit visibility and payment timing.
Rewards still influence spending behavior, particularly among financially stable households. Half of consumers who prioritize rewards said tracking or redeeming rewards through a mobile app encouraged them to spend more on the card.
Advertisement
But the report suggests that financial stress changes the hierarchy of engagement. As household budgets tighten, rewards become less central than predictability, visibility and control.
That shift helps explain why mobile apps increasingly influence which cards become top of wallet.
Among credit-dependent consumers, 77% said the quality of a credit card app influences which card they use most often. Credit-dependent consumers also reported the highest app adoption levels, with 77% using their primary card’s app regularly or occasionally.
The competition, in other words, is no longer simply about card acquisition. It is about becoming the card consumers rely on to navigate everyday financial management.
Digital Experience Becomes a Financial Retention Tool
The report also suggests that digital experience increasingly shapes retention risk.
Advertisement
Nearly 1 in 4 cardholders said a poor app or digital experience contributed to reduced card use. Among Gen Z consumers, that figure climbed to 45%.
At the same time, 7 in 10 cardholders said app quality influences which card becomes their primary card, underscoring how mobile interfaces are becoming embedded directly into consumer payment behavior.
For issuers, the implications extend beyond app design.
Consumers living paycheck to paycheck hold nearly as many credit cards as financially stable households, meaning financially stressed consumers are not disengaging from credit entirely. Instead, they are becoming more selective about which cards feel easiest to manage and most useful during periods of financial pressure.
Rewards and promotional offers still matter, particularly among affluent and financially stable consumers. But for a growing segment of households, the most valuable card may be the one that reduces uncertainty around balances, payment timing and available liquidity.
Advertisement
In a crowded multi-card market, financial visibility itself is becoming part of the product.
