Our calculator models over 4,000 pieces of legislation across four government departments to show how one individual is affected. Automatically updated on an ongoing basis and tested to be accurate across over one million real cases, Policy in Practice’s Better Off Calculator was built by people who understand the welfare benefit system and shaped by organisations who use it.
I feel confident using the Policy in Practice Benefit Calculator tool when advising clients. The layout for entering information is clear and logical as is the results report (I also like the functionality to request UC and/or legacy benefits and a detailed report showing the expert breakdown).
This is the easiest calculator to use. The information boxes give more insight to the question being asked. It does not take as long as the others. You can also change situations such as childcare cost, housing cost, working hours easily without having to start again.
Policy and Practice is so easy to use, providing an accurate, simple process to follow to achieve your results. I use the platform daily for work which reduces my workload and allows me to provide results very quickly.
Bringing the Policy in Practice team on board has really helped us to help our customers. We are only a small team and so it takes time to get through the referrals but having the calculator means we can refer the customers to use that during the busy times and our Housing Officers are able to use it when necessary also. We recommend use of the calculator during the sign up period to ensure the property will be affordable and again for every change affecting our customers during the life of their tenancy with us. Knowing Adam is available to discuss any issues we might have or possible adaptations is key for us. He checks in to make sure all is well and listens to feedback. Its really taken some of the pressure off our lives as advisers
I use Policy in Practice within my role to support people back into employment and I have found the calculator to be user friendly with lots of information for me to provide my customers. Whenever I have needed help, there has always been a helpful adviser on the live chat to resolve any issues. I prefer using Policy In Practise calculator to any other calculator that is out there. 10/10 would recommend!!
Use as a debt adviser, this website and tool allows me to progress my cases ahead of time and allows for the client to increase their current benefit award where possible. A great and useful tool to have.
As a local authority homelessness prevention officer, the better off calculator has been an invaluable part of the advice I provide to service users. Being able to project a service user’s income and expenditure across a range of scenarios allows me to provide advice on current and future rent affordability, enabling service users to make informed choices about their housing. The “explainers” within the better off calculator are really helpful for local authority officers and service users alike, providing detail and context to welfare benefit criteria that would otherwise be complex and confusing
The team at Policy in Practice are dedicated to putting money in the pockets of people in need. There are very few things more important than that. They understand front line services, how to provide support for officers and residents, and they do so with passion.!
I use the better-off calculator on a daily basis. I have also been lucky enough to work with parts of their team to make it a little more user-friendly. Communication has always been 100%, and questions I have asked have always been answered in a timely manner. I find that working with Policy in Practice and being involved with how things work gives a sense of collaborative working that benefits both sides of the screen. Well done, keep up the fantastic work!!
This tool is brilliant! No baffling, no complex information to unravel. I used the site in the first instance for my own personal circumstance. Now I have been able to help-out some who need more support around Benefits and income. A life-saver, when I was facing a loss of work at 54. I was so over-whelmed with what Benefits I could access. So, finding this tool was a life-saver (not an overstatement). The fact you can also use the Monthly Budget Planner works really well for my Autistic wife.
We at PA Housing use the Policy in Practice calculator for all our general benefits and affordability assessments. We have tried other calculators in the past but this one beats all. It’s straightforward, and takes every scenario into consideration. We have this on our website for our residents to us. They can ping the results over to us, so we can can assist further. Technical and practical support from Policy in Practice is also second to none.
Policy in Practice is a simple tool to use that gives correct, up to date information that we can use to help our customers along their journey back in to sustainable employment. I have used other calculators in the past but this is the best one i have ever used.
The Policy in Practice calculator is very user friendly. Having used various calculators previously, I find it simple to use, has explanation drop boxes and expert breakdowns. It so easy to use and explain things with members of the public. Easy to show comparisons of scenarios as well as comparisons of legacy benefits to UC. Nice and easy to work out work how much transitional Protection may be available.
I use this all the time to calculate affordability of rent in the private sector and, provided I am given the correct information, it is very accurate. I advise my clients to use it when they find a property in the private sector, so that they know exactly what, after they have paid rent and council tax, they will have left for food, travel, bills, etc. For me, the benefits calculator is invaluable.
The tool for budgeting is excellent and I’ve also been able to advise customers who have been missing out on claiming hundreds of pounds each month. Being able to identify those who are not yet claiming UC if they will benefit more from going over early has been most useful.
After a benefits check using the Better Off Calculator to ensure the client is getting everything they’re entitled to, we can then do a budget to see the breakdown of where their funds are going and how some costs can be lowered. The main thing we want to do with clients is put in place an affordable budget that prioritises the main things that they need to spend on and budgeting for that in the future, in turn avoiding credit.
Keith Thorne
Service Manager
The Better Off Calculator has changed the way we work completely across different teams. We have over 100 staff using it and there now tends to be only one conversation with our customers so it’s made it easier for them. It’s speeded up processes in a way that we didn’t really think would happen.
Nadine Burns
Customer Support Team Manager
The customer is going to be £7,000 a year better off. Without the Better Off Calculator I’m not sure that case would have ever made its way to our team because the customer wasn’t in arrears, she was paying and she never had any idea she could claim any benefits.
Nadine Burns
Customer Support Team Manager
We have used the Better Off Calculator for several years. We use it seamlessly across three large departments and it has helped improve our customers’ experience. Customers give us their information once making conversations easier, and it helps us to have all the information we need in order to give support. We have helped lots of customers claim benefits they did not know they are entitled to and have always found Policy in Practice’s support if we have any queries to be impeccable.
Nadine Burns
Customer Support Team Manager
Staff at Elite Supported Employment find the Policy in Practice Calculator an excellent tool to provide information to our participants. The calculator is easy to use and the expert calculator breakdown tool makes the results easy to understand. Being able to print off the graph also gives our participants a visual document to refer to. It’s also great to be able to save a case, we can easily find a calculation and make any adjustments if needed, saving the time of completing a new calculation.
Sue Price, Elite Supported Employment
One of the reasons we have chosen Policy in Practice’s Benefit and Budgeting tool is that it allows you to see, when you put in the postcode, certain things that are available to customers, discounted wifi being one of them.
Kirsty Hunn, Fedcap
Income maximisation is so important, as is building a customer’s confidence and identifying additional money they may be able to claim. This is where we use the Policy in Practice Better Off Calculator.
Deborah Ware, Financial Wellness Group
We really encourage our new customers to use the Better Off Calculator to help them be independent and find out what benefits they’re entitled to. It’s been a big help to our staff, our housing team and our domestic abuse teams in particular, to double-check the advice they are giving to people.
Beverley Hiden, Rooftop Housing
The Better Off Calculator has enabled us to carry out over 4,000 benefit calculations. The ‘what if’ scenarios in the calculator enable us to have a conversation with someone where we can model the ‘in work’ and ‘out of work’ scenarios. It gives our tenants some certainty when they go back into the world of work, move into a new sector or take up employment in another town.
Darren Thomas, Grwp Cynefin
We use the calculator with Reach Out, our vulnerable customer’s arm. The tool is invaluable in the early identification of benefit eligibility and assists with cost savings to our vulnerable customers. It is simple to use and shows a level of detail like nothing else on the market.
Ben Jones, Sigma
Supporting customers to ensure they maximise their income is a vital part of our debt advice process. Close to 50% of customers who we’ve done a benefits assessment for are eligible for more benefits than they’ve been claiming. The tool is quick, intuitive to use and rich in detail – including excellent information on support at local authority level. Another plus is that, as well as alerting customers to additional benefits, it highlights other entitlements such as free prescriptions, free school meals, help with water costs, reduced price WiFi contracts and more.
Sebrina McCullough, Financial Wellness Group
The differences with this calculator, compared to others on the market, are the income assessment features that give the built in ability to maximise benefits and see the impact of working extra hours. The Universal Credit calendar feature helps us to flex payments based on fluctuating income.
Carole Kenney, Phoenix
I decided Policy in Practice’s Better Off Calculator was something we really needed. It’s enabled us to provide a consistent approach to assessing affordability. We’ve been able to give our customers an online tool which lets them take control of their finances and liaise with us electronically, without the awkwardness or challenge sometimes faced in person.
Carole Kenney, Phoenix
The Better Off Calculator is used as a motivational tool, as what better way is there to show someone how they can improve their situation by entering employment than by seeing that big difference as a financial figure?
Andy Johnson, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council
The Better Off Calculator makes it much quicker to do calculations and the tooltips make it easy to use, meaning we only need to train people once. The simplicity of the calculator means that clients can often self serve with little support.
Sue McCarron, Citizens Advice Wirral
You can explain benefit entitlements but people may not fully grasp the numbers. Having the Better Off Calculator as a mechanism to visually explain the breakdown of entitlements using colour coded charts really helps as it’s something people can relate to.
Grant Bailey, Cheltenham Borough Homes
The Better Off Calculator is invaluable to us. We use it to help the homeless find properties that are affordable and to provide the correct advice.
I was attracted to the Better Off Calculator because, as one tool, [it gives us] more consistency. It’s more than just an income and expenditure calculator. I was particularly excited about the better off scenarios [that help us to] work with our customers to show them how their income may improve, or not, depending on how their circumstances change, which links heavily into the Universal Credit calculation. I also like the action plan functionality and the self service option.
Our biggest concern, as UC rolls out across our large geographic area, was that we have consistency, that our tenants get the same service and also that our advisors have something to fall back on. Policy in Practice gives us that and we can access it from anywhere. The way that Policy in Practices deals with income entitlement, as well as the expenditure of the household, gives our advisors the confidence to have frank and honest discussions with households. Nothing speaks better to our tenants than facts and figures.
The best thing for landlords to do is to have a small team of staff that are dedicated to getting their heads around Universal Credit so that they can give the information to their colleagues. We’ve got 4 to 5 years to get to the end of this exercise, maybe even longer. The important thing is to look at your high risk cases which are your new claims and look to support them. I recommend you do as much as you can to support your tenants because the more you invest now, the more you will actually save by avoiding problems further down the line.
We needed to look at people’s circumstances before giving more flexible payment arrangements which meant we had to make decisions about what people could afford to pay. It was very difficult for staff to be objective and consistent in their approach, which wasn’t very fair for the customer. This also made it difficult for us to explain our reasoning to our clients.
Carole Kenney, Phoenix
We believe that, with the right support, most people can find work and build a career. We chose to work with Policy in Practice because their unparalleled expertise in simplifying the welfare system, as well as their Better Off Calculator, allows us to deliver innovative services to jobseekers across the entire Southern region.
The Better Off Calculator is amazing, the frontline volunteers find it really useful. I especially like the calendar that shows claimants who get paid weekly how their monthly Universal Credit payments will be affected over the next 12 months.
When we were looking at a new benefit calculator, all of our colleagues who tested Policy and Practice’s Better Off Calculator agreed it was the one they wanted to have – the decision was unanimous! It’s ease of use and visual features will make it much easier to help our customers.
The Policy in Practice Better Off Calculator is a fantastic asset for our employability teams to use with people on the Work and Health Programme. The support the Policy in Practice team have provided from start to finish has been excellent.
Our advisors using the Better Off Calculator were 3 times more effective at getting people into work.
The software is so user friendly and there are lots of intuitive features in there which mean that an advisor doesn’t have to be a benefits expert.
Deven understood what our needs were and listened to how we intended to use the calculator as part of our pilot. His detailed knowledge of the current benefit system and Universal Credit, combined with his technical expertise to build online tools of this type, made him the ideal person to work with.
Policy in Practice has helped Oxford to develop a budgeting tool that helps our advisors to have better, outcome-focused conversations with our residents. They have made DHP applications more effective, as well as more efficient, reducing the dependence of our residents on discretionary housing payments.
As well as mitigating against the risks brought by the welfare reforms programme we also saw that there was a big chance to try and do something different, to promote opportunity.
Our tenants are facing increased pressure on their budgets as a result of welfare reforms. The Better Off Calculator allows us to provide better income and budgeting support to our tenants.
The Better Off Calculator is different. Its outcome-based approach has been very powerful and has really helped us to change behaviour of both our residents and advisors.
The software is user friendly with lots of intuitive features. Any software is only as good as its implementation and the support we’ve had from Policy in Practice has been a massive benefit.
Help for advisors is not a feature of our free basic calculator. See our professional expert calculator for more information on this feature.
Budgeting is not a feature of our free basic calculator. See our professional expert calculator for more information on this feature.
IRRV performance Awards 2021
Folkestone and Hythe District Council: Excellence in education and staff development
London Borough of Tower Hamlets: Excellence in innovation (service delivery)
CDER Group: Excellence in social inclusion
Walsall Council: Revenues team of the year
Public Finance Innovation Awards 2021
Rooftop Housing: Finance Team of the Year – Local Services (finalist)
Public Finance Awards 2020
Haringey Council: Public Finance Leader of the Year (finalist)
MJ Achievement Awards 2019
London Borough of Croydon: Delivering Better Outcomes
Credit and Collections Technology Awards 2017
Policy in Practice and Phoenix: Best Affordability Assessment Solution
