HESA

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) module provides highly effective tools to enable you to submit your information to HESA easily and quickly. By using data that already exists and mapping the data items to those required by HESA, the time spent on gathering data can be dramatically reduced. After the data is gathered, the HESA module can check for missing information, incorrect codes, and other errors. Any errors are displayed and you can quickly correct the data. Finally, you can use a wizard to create the return, validating it with HESA’s own validation toolkit. You can then submit the data electronically to HESA.

The process to submit information to HESA has four stages:

1. Create staff records.

The HESA return requires information about the staff and their contracts. Therefore, in the first stage of the process, the HESA module extracts all the basic details of members of staff from your organization’s existing personnel database. Using browsers to decide who is included also enables exceptions to be excluded.

A person record and one or more contract records is held for each member of staff. You can change details by typing the data and saving it. Easy-to-use lookups are provided on all code entry fields and entries are validated against HESA’s coding manual.

2. Use existing information.

The HESA module provides two powerful and flexible tools to import and validate existing computerized data before it is added it to the HESA database: data import and data flood. These tools can dramatically reduce the need to type codes. The flood tool enables you to transfer the data from the personnel database and recode it as HESA data. The import tool enables you to transfer data from a comma-separated value (CSV) file.

3. Check the data and correct exceptions.

The HESA module then checks the data for errors in coding and missing information and allows for corrections to be made and missing information to be provided using fast entry windows.

Alternatively, the task of providing the missing data can be made the responsibility of the staff members themselves, by using the Web Portal components, which provide each staff member with a view of the data kept about themselves and the ability to correct it. This transfer of responsibility for personal information has proved very successful. There are many known benefits, including more accurate data keeping and reduced administrative costs.

4. Submit the information to HESA.

You can check, validate and correct the data as much and as often as necessary, until you are completely satisfied with the end result. Then the final step is to submit the information to HESA.