Why we built Clerk Assist

I have worked in local councils for a number of years, first as a parish councillor and chairman, and later as a clerk and locum clerk. I have worked with councils of very different sizes, from small village councils to larger town councils. Despite their differences, the same pattern appears again and again.

Clerks are repeatedly solving the same problems.

We all keep reinventing the same things

Take policies as a simple example.

A clerk is asked to produce a new policy. The usual starting point is to search around other councils — or the local ALC, or a friendly fellow clerk on Facebook — find something suitable, borrow parts from one document, adapt parts from another, change the council name and try to make it fit.

A couple of hours later, the policy is finished.

Meanwhile, a clerk in the next village may have done almost exactly the same thing six months earlier, and another clerk ten miles away may be doing it next week.

Sometimes the process goes wrong. I have taken over councils where policies on the website still contained another council’s name, or where model documents had been adopted without important local details being changed.

This is not because clerks do not care about their work. It is because small councils expect one person, often working only a handful of hours each week, to understand and manage an extraordinary range of subjects.

Policies are only one example. The same duplication happens with accounts, budgets, precepts, agendas, minutes, annual governance work, asset records, compliance dates, websites and dozens of other routine jobs.

Small councils need systems designed for small councils

There are already excellent accounting packages, website platforms and specialist council systems available.

The problem is that small parish councils do not always need everything those systems can do. They often cannot justify the cost.

A council handling millions of pounds needs sophisticated financial software. A small parish council may have a clerk working five or eight hours a week who simply needs to keep accurate records, prepare a sensible budget, calculate the precept, report clearly to councillors and complete the annual return.

That clerk does not necessarily have twenty hours available to learn an accounting package, followed by another twenty hours learning how to manage a website, followed by another system for documents and another for compliance.

The technology should reduce the workload, not become another part of it. That became one of the fundamental ideas behind Clerk Assist.

Information should flow through the system

Another frustration with separate systems is that the same information is repeatedly entered in different places.

Council finances are a good example. Your accounts tell you what happened last year. Those figures help you prepare the next budget. The budget then informs the precept.

These are not really three completely separate jobs. They are stages of the same process.

The same principle applies elsewhere. Information about councillors, meetings, assets, policies and responsibilities is used repeatedly throughout the year.

Clerk Assist is designed so that, wherever practical, information already held by the system can be used again rather than having to be re-entered. That sounds simple, but it can remove a surprising amount of unnecessary administration — and errors.

The website is only one part of it

Council websites were another obvious area where the same work was being repeated.

WordPress is an excellent platform. I have used it for almost as long as it has existed, and run a 1,200-page, 2,000-product ecommerce company from it. It is enormously flexible, which is one reason it powers so much of the web.

But parish council websites usually have very similar, and much smaller, requirements. They do not necessarily need the weight of that system. They need council information, councillor details, policies, financial information, agendas, minutes and reliable publication of meeting notices.

A general-purpose website system can do all of this, but it often requires configuration, plugins and a fair amount of clicking around.

Clerk Assist approaches it from the opposite direction. The system already knows what a parish council needs to publish, so information entered as part of the clerk’s normal work can also help maintain the council website.

The website is not Clerk Assist. It is simply one part of a much wider system. The same is true of accounts, policies and meeting management. Each is useful individually. The real benefit comes from bringing them together.

It started as something I wanted for myself

The original idea was not particularly ambitious.

I clerk councils myself and I can programme. I began thinking about the repetitive jobs I was doing and asking a fairly obvious question: could I automate some of this?

If I could make my own work easier, reduce duplication and build something that remembered routine tasks for me, it would be useful even if nobody else ever used it.

Then I started talking to other clerks. The reaction was generally: could it do this? Could it remind me about that? Could it help with this job as well?

What started as a tool for my own councils gradually became something much broader.

Taking pressure off the clerk

Clerk Assist is not intended to replace the clerk, or even to reduce their hours. Quite the opposite.

The clerk remains the person exercising judgement, advising the council, preparing recommendations, understanding the local circumstances and ensuring that the council acts properly. The system is there to help with the administration around that work.

One of the biggest risks in a small council is reliance on one person’s memory. A certificate needs renewing. A policy needs reviewing. An insurance policy expires. An inspection is due. A statutory deadline is approaching.

Most clerks have experienced that moment of suddenly thinking: did I remember to do that? Usually the answer is yes. Occasionally it is not.

I have encountered a council where a gas certificate had been out of date for many months simply because it had been forgotten. Nothing disastrous happened, but it illustrates the problem. When a council relies almost entirely upon one individual remembering every recurring task, eventually something will be missed.

Clerk Assist is intended to reduce that dependence on memory. If the information is entered correctly, the system can help keep track of what needs doing and when.

Making the difficult jobs less intimidating

Some parts of clerking can also be surprisingly stressful the first time you encounter them.

I remember preparing my first council budget and wondering whether I was getting it right. You are trying to predict the next financial year while still learning how the council operates and what councillors intend to do.

By the second or third time, much of that anxiety disappears because you understand the process. But every new clerk still has to go through that first year.

A good system should help guide that process rather than simply present the clerk with an empty spreadsheet. The same applies to the annual governance process, meeting administration and many of the other jobs that become straightforward once you have done them several times.

Clerk Assist aims to build some of that experience into the process.

Better continuity for the council

There is another very important benefit. Council systems should not make sense only to the person who created them.

I have seen financial spreadsheets which worked perfectly well for the clerk who built them but were almost impossible for somebody else to understand. That creates a serious problem when a clerk leaves, becomes ill, or another person has to take over unexpectedly.

Clerk Assist is designed around consistent processes and records. That helps the current clerk, but it also means that the next clerk should be able to understand what has been happening without having to reverse-engineer somebody else’s filing system.

Good administration should belong to the council, not exist solely inside the clerk’s head.

Helping clerks use the hours they are actually paid for

Most clerks of small councils know that contracted hours and actual hours do not always bear a close relationship to one another. There are busy months, difficult projects, unexpected correspondence and meetings that generate considerably more work than anticipated.

Clerk Assist cannot change that entirely. What it can do is remove some repetitive administration, reduce unnecessary duplication and make routine jobs quicker. Even recovering a small amount of time each week matters when you only have a few contracted hours available in the first place.

That time can then be spent on the work where the clerk’s knowledge and judgement actually matter.

The clerk’s assistant

Clerking can sometimes be a surprisingly solitary job. In many small councils, one person is responsible for finance, meetings, governance, correspondence, the website, statutory deadlines, contracts, policies and whatever unexpected issue arrives that week.

That responsibility can create a constant background concern that something might have been forgotten.

Clerk Assist is intended to reduce some of that pressure. It will not make decisions for the clerk or run the council. It is there to organise information, connect related jobs, prompt where appropriate, simplify routine administration and help the clerk keep control of everything that needs doing.

That is why it is called Clerk Assist.

It started because I wanted an assistant. It has grown because other clerks wanted one too.

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