Product Development Roadmap

At Scribe we are continually developing our software to meet the needs of Town and Parish Councils across England and Wales. Having worked with local councils for over 30 years the software has become almost unrecognisable from its desktop beginnings and we are very excited to share our development plans, feature additions and product roadmap for future releases. Scribe pre-2019 is a totally different offering than today.

Scribe Accounts: Software as a Service (SAAS)

Scribe Accounts is currently the ONLY exclusively web based accounting solution available to Town and Parish Councils. There are no downloads, installs or tricky updates to manage as everything is accessible from your web browser.

User Settings and Permissions

Scribe's unique set up allows for total council management of the accounts. We offer unlimited user licences as standard to encourage transparency across your council and to allow for ease of data access during times of remote working. Permission based user settings also allows for secure data handling as the council will have full control over who can not just see, but also access certain reports or data.

Data Storage

Scribe is hosted in Amazon's ISO27001 certified data centre in London. We run multiple auto scaling web servers and use RDS for our database server. Data is automatically backed up at 4am each morning and we retain a rolling 30 days of backups. The database can only be accessed from local machines within our Virtual Private Cloud. Remote access to the VPC is restricted by IP address. All data is encrypted during transit. Remote access and Administrative passwords are high strength, restricted to key personnel and centrally managed and secured with PBKDF2

What Did We Improve in 2020?

Despite all the challenges of 2020 we continued to improve Scribe towards our mission of making Councils’ more efficient. In the last 12 months Scribe has delivered 27 significant product improvements from 1000’s of code updates. Significant improvements included:

• Forecasting and budgeting tools
• Reserves Management
• Integrated reports
• Upload options for invoices and photographs
• Additional reports filters
• Updated user permissions
• HMRC Integration for all Making Tax Digital Customers
• Email reports from Scribe
• Borrowing improvements
• Previous years data integrations
• Welsh AGAR
• Improved navigation
• Web Based Scribe Cemetery

Please note, our “Councillor Pack” has samples of Scribe’s reports and features.

Looking ahead 2021

With the recent announcement of our new web based Cemetery software we are also pleased to announce that we are also developing a booking system, currently on track for an early 2021 release. This has been a request for some time from our existing customers who would like to see the same ease of use and online access that Scribe Accounts brings, introduced as additional modules. We are also currently undergoing steps to introduce payroll, which has been a long awaited feature for our current customers and with this will come the integration of online banking. So in 2021 you can expect as a minimum:

Scribe Accounts Core - Continual improvement of the core accounting product based on customer feedback. The product will continue to improve each month.

Scribe Bookings - Currently in development with dates set for an early 2021 release and first rounds of testing. You can sign up now to be among the first users to access this exciting new software which will also fully integrate with Scribe Accounts.

Accounts Payroll - Currently in development with dates set for release late Q1 2021. The introduction of payroll will be an optional extra for Scribe customers who want to benefit from having their payroll managed professionally via our own experienced team.

Accounts Online Banking Integration - Due for release alongside our Payroll module, this will act as a live bank feed directly into your Scribe Accounts database allowing for easy and accurate reconciliation and huge savings on your Clerks time and effort.

Scribe Cemetery - Improved mapping, plots, burial reports. Better usability and further integrations.

Our Pledge to Support Local Authority Councils

We understand the need for councils to invest their funds wisely and that is why we pledge to continually develop Scribe to be kept inline and up to date with the most accurate reports and processes to ensure you can always be confident that you are working with best practices in place. Come audit time you can be assured your accounts are kept and held in accordance with the latest Government Requirements. This is also why we offer full training, set up and ongoing support for your Clerk/RFO with our own in house qualified accountant who is an expert in Local Council Accounting.

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