Creating a New QAR Reconciliation in PICSWeb
Selecting the New Reconciliation button in the QAR Reconciliation page will start a new reconciliation.
In the first step, select a QAR data file. If you have already run a reconciliation, the files you have used will be shown here to use again. Alternatively, you can upload a new QAR file. This must be in the CSV file format.
Select Continue once you have uploaded the file to progress to the next step.
The next step shows the various options for reconciling the QAR. PICSWeb will attempt to read the options from the QAR filename (as seen in the table below), but these can be changed if they are loaded incorrectly or if the file is not in the standard ESFA format.
Example filenames are:
10011001_2021_QAR_InYear_R12-APPS_Combined.csv
10011001_2021_QAR_InYear_R12-ET_Combined.csv
10011001_2021_QAR_InYear_R12-Train_Combined.csv
The following options are available in this step:
Option | Notes |
|---|---|
Report Date | For simplicity, it is assumed that the report date is always 31st July in the contract year of the QAR (i.e. the last day of the contract year). Note that the format is “year/year-plus-one”, so 2021 is actually 2020/2021 and therefore represents the 2020 contract year. |
UKPRN | The first 8 characters of the filename represent the UKPRN. This is used to filter the PICS QAR data, and a value must be selected as the QAR extract only ever contains the data for one UKPRN. |
QAR Report Type | The report type is set based on the filename as follows:
PICS produces separate Traineeship reports for programme and component aims, whereas the QAR data contains all traineeship aims in one file. Therefore it is required to manually change to Traineeship Component Aims if a reconciliation for component aims is wanted. |
Only include data affecting the latest reporting year | As both the PICS and QAR reports contain a lot of aims which ended in previous years, and therefore have no effect on the current year’s QAR totals, this option can be used to only show aims where either the PICS or QAR Overall Year is the report year, with all other aims removed. |
Selecting Start Reconciliation will start the background task to load the data and generate the reconciliation report. An email is sent to confirm when the reconciliation is either completed or failed.