About Us
Liaison Financial helps the health economy to save over £85 million per annum by identifying and achieving savings in non-pay expenditure for reinvestment into healthcare.
In areas of complex and continually changing legislation, high volume transactions, and detailed regulation, our expertise, recommendations, and in-depth investigation helps to provide greater savings for our clients.
We are dedicated to protecting the health economy and committed to becoming a valuable part of your on-site team. Our experts help you to reduce operational pressures and release internal resources while providing insight and expertise via financial compliance, analysis, and reconciliation reviews.
As part of the Liaison Group, Liaison Financial continually makes investments to provide excellence, innovation, and technology to improve the global health economy.
“We have used Liaison for many years and we feel the additional support and ‘nothing is too much trouble’ attitude gives us the best value for money service on the market today.”
Deputy Director of Finance
Northumbria Health Care NHS Foundation Trust
Our Services Deliver Savings for the NHS
We have over 30 years of experience in providing specialist services to the NHS that deliver savings and help to protect non-pay expenditure. We offer a range of services to maximise savings and income for the NHS so that it can reinvest this money back into healthcare.
Liaison Financial has the largest specialist team of VAT subject experts and finance consultants for the NHS in the UK. This means that our well trained and experienced team of advisors are well equipped to offer specialist financial savings advice and deliver exceptional levels of service.
We have specialised teams that deliver savings through following services:
VAT Services
Liaison Financial’s VAT services are designed to ensure maximum VAT recovery and compliance. Our team delivers the VATflow service (regular service) to over 220 NHS clients and the VATplus service (an annual re-review assurance service) to another 40+ NHS organisations that use an alternative VAT provider.
These services are performed by our team of experts who have all completed extensive NHS VAT specific training programmes, gained a wealth of experience, and are supported by a strong technical team which includes former HMRC inspectors. They provide immediate updates on new rulings, make current HMRC interpretations known, and ensure that best practice policies are shared across the business so that our team is always up to date, reducing your risks and maximising your VAT recovery.
Over 75% of our VAT staff have been part of the Liaison Financial family for more than 10 years. The value of our approach and experience is demonstrated through the results of the VATplus service, which highlights the additional VAT recovered due to our knowledge and expertise in NHS VAT over other providers.
“Liaison continue to advise and support us on a monthly basis providing a depth of knowledge on complex issues that we have come to rely on.”
Purchasing Manager
Rotherham, Doncaster & South Humber NHS Foundation Trust
Our regular VAT compliance service. With Liaison Financial’s VATflow service, you have your own dedicated and experienced VAT advisor who visits you monthly to complete a review of all financial transactions, ensuring adjustments are made in the correct period for maximum recovery and full compliance. Working as part of your team, our experienced advisor ensures that they understand your challenges and vision and they are best placed to offer effective pro-active advice and support. We are proud to recover over £80 million per annum for our VATflow clients.
Planning and Consultancy
In addition to delivering the innovative VAT services we also provide specific, strategic consultancy to our clients and as a market leading provider we are constantly striving to find new initiatives to enable the NHS to maximise savings and efficiencies. As the NHS has become more VAT aware, we have increasingly focused on areas of consultancy where we can provide added value. The NHS has been expanding into many new areas such as new types of contract and joint ventures and we have been at the forefront of advising and assisting with these new areas to ensure they are managed in a VAT efficient and compliant manner.
Helpline Support
To ensure we are there when you need us the most, we have a dedicated free NHS helpline that you can contact when queries arise. This prevents VAT errors accumulating between visits.
NHS VAT Helpline: 0800 700 652
Training
We offer extensive, free, CPD accredited monthly webinar training and a world-class online training portal. Our new modular Training Portal allows instant access so staff can train whenever it is convenient for them. Technical subjects available in the Portal include VAT From Scratch (levels 1, 2, and 3), Procurement Tips, VAT on Income, and Capital and Professional Services. Our training support is designed to increase internal knowledge, self-sufficiency, and confidence.
If you already have a Liaison Financial Training Portal account, please log in here.
Speak with your Liaison Financial advisor or register your interest to find out more here.
Accounts Payable (AP) Reviews
The processing of financial payments is an integral and vital element within every organisation. Our AP review offers a comprehensive, risk-free, end-to-end service to identify and recover savings.
We examine and interrogate AP related transactional information to identify erroneous payments. Irregularities can occur in many forms, including but not limited to duplicate payments, duplicate charges, and unallocated payments.
Using a combination of AI software and human expertise, our specialists complete a variety of additional checks to those traditionally included in software solution and NFI reviews. By doing so, this allows us to consistently uncover anomalies which would otherwise go unidentified.
In one seamless motion, our team of recovery specialists liaise directly with suppliers to resolve each anomaly in an effective and efficient manner. Our fees are based on the savings achieved providing real value for money, an additional layer of financial safeguarding, and independent assurance over the robustness of your internal control processes.
We have recovered £65m in overpayments and overcharges to date, money that would have otherwise been lost.
“I would recommend the Liaison Financial Duplicate review to other trusts both for the savings and the independent assurance. Completing the Liaison Financial AP review has definitely increased my confidence in our internal processes.”
Head of Financial Accounting
The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
CHC Invoice Validation Reviews
Financial governance has never been more significant than it is today. To achieve and safeguard financial stability, CCGs should have a robust infrastructure embedded within their organisation to ensure only accurate, relevant, and appropriate payments are processed. This maximises a CCG’s ability to provide CHC Healthcare for patients within its allocated budget.
Our bespoke reviews focus on identifying and securing funds via our full end-to-end offering. We appreciate the high degree of technicalities surrounding the application of CHC contractual agreements alongside the processing of high value payments. To date, we have delivered savings of more than £4.5m.
Our comprehensive suite of financial reviews reconciles payments against local policies and framework arrangements to identify overcharges. Such scrutiny is applied to several areas including deceased patients, hospital admissions, duplicate funding streams, and pricing reductions in care packages. We continue to interrogate the data in a widespread manner, with a view to maximising savings opportunities.
Our reviews are carried out in a tailored manner which minimises the impact on CCG staff. Having worked with the NHS for 30 years, we acknowledge and accept the current demands on staff and ensure that we allocate the necessary resources to limit any negative impact. Not only do we identify these funds, our CHC Resolutions team liaises with suppliers directly to get them confirmed on our clients’ behalf.
“The reviews weren’t without their challenges, but the way Liaison handled themselves was excellent. The correspondence, especially from the recovery team, was very professional.”
Deputy Chief Finance Officer
NHS South Tees CCG and NHS Hartlepool and Stockton on Tees CCG
Telecoms Review
We review your total expenditure on telecoms infrastructure to analyse cost and utilisation against current requirements.
Furthermore, we identify areas that can be optimised to achieve substantial savings as well as ensuring a robust infrastructure for current and future telecom needs.
By working alongside NHS Telecoms experts within the team, you can be confident that their advice and recommendations are effective and will not affect the quality of your service and infrastructure.
Find out more here.
Private Patients Optimisation
As your partner, we help and support the advancement of your Private Patient business as and when you need us. We can help to identify new opportunities and help you to achieve your unique goals.
With commercial, operational, and strategic support, our expert advice leads to an increased income generation combined with full clinical and corporate governance.
Whether you would like to maximise income, be assured that you are performing in a commercially viable and compliant way, enable your Trust’s Private Patient Service to reach its true market potential, or you are starting from scratch, we can help.
Read more about our Private Patients Optimisation service here.
Contract Compliance Reviews
Building on our success in identifying savings by analysing Accounts Payable information, we apply the same expertise to compare any payments made against the terms of the contract. As well as identifying areas of overcharging, we engage with the supplier on your behalf to pursue these refunds.
We review all contracts with financial impacts that include but are not limited to:
NHS Contract Lifecycle Management
Cutting whole life costs | Driving supplier performance | Delivering savings
Managing contracts can be tough at the best of times. In the complex world of the NHS, it can be a never-ending challenge. Despite best intentions, the performance and value written into your Trust’s contracts at the outset can evaporate without any clear reason as to why.
For this reason, control of the contract, in every aspect, is vital. Thus, the partnership between Liaison Financial and Lifecycle is invaluable. By actively managing every aspect of a contract, we monitor costs and supplier performance to ensure your Trust receives the value you anticipated throughout the contract’s life.
Liaison Financial and Lifecycle have worked exclusively with NHS trusts for decades, saving them £100s of millions to help meet CIP targets. More recently, we have pooled our expertise to provide an even more effective service.
Download this brochure to find out more about how the combined expertise of Liaison Financial and Lifecycle can extract greater value from NHS contracts.