Five figures reported separately, because a pipeline idea and a validated saving are not the same fact. Confidence derived from lifecycle rather than typed. Quality as a gate. And the scheme owner cannot validate their own delivery.
A financial recovery plan — or a system improvement plan, a cost improvement programme, an efficiency programme, a QIPP plan; the local word varies and the thing does not — fails in a predictable way. Everything on the list is added together: the idea somebody had in a workshop, the business case in draft, the scheme already delivering, and the saving finance has actually evidenced. One headline goes to the board, and by month nine it is unrecoverable.
commvita reports five figures and never adds them together.
The minimum content of an agreed recovery plan is not invented here. It is taken from Financial Recovery Plans in the NHS (Healthcare Financial Management Association, Financial Management and Research Committee) — eight essential elements, each mapped to whether commvita can check it from the record or can only record that it is present.
The edition read is not current, and the product says so. Three facts are kept apart: the document was read (parsed, not recalled); it is cited; and its edition is not current — it references Strategic Health Authorities, Primary Care Trusts and HSC 1999/146, and SHAs and PCTs were abolished in 2013. commvita therefore encodes the durable principles and the minimum content requirement and deliberately does not reproduce the approval routes or circular references, because directing a finance director to a body that no longer exists would be worse than citing nothing at all.
A principle written on a slide is advice. The same principle written as a gate is a control. Each of the six is enforced at a specific point and says what it enforces, so a reviewer can audit the claim rather than take it.
The join to Quality
Impact Assessment is the part most savings systems leave out. A scheme's
impact_level is a free string somebody types, and an approval gate
that merely checks a label exists is a field which looks like it means more
than it does.
So where a QIA is linked, the impact level is derived from the assessment
and the typed value is ignored — a caller-supplied status is not
trusted over a computed one. Where none is linked, the typed value is returned and
reported as self_declared, with a note saying no assessment sits
behind it. A board can therefore see which savings schemes carry an assessment and
which carry only a word.
Cumulative impact is the failure a per-scheme gate cannot catch. Four individually acceptable schemes landing on one population is exactly the case the quality framework names — cost improvement “including the effect of cumulative CIPs within a service over time” — and it is why the two modules are joined rather than adjacent.
April to March is England's financial year. This is a multi-jurisdiction product, so the calendar is resolved from the Jurisdiction Profile and fails safe to nothing: a plan whose jurisdiction has no configured calendar cannot phase, and says so, rather than silently phasing to England's year and then reporting a Q4 back-loading warning against the wrong quarter.
Every value is stored in pence. A float sum loses a penny per sub-penny row, and a recovery plan is summed thousands of times — across schemes, periods, cost centres and organisations. Two people reading the same plan must get the same total.
| Part | Where | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Plans, schemes, phasing, validation, delivery teams | /financial-recovery | Live |
| API | /frp/ — 14 endpoints |
Live |
| The guidance, with its currency caveat | GET /frp/guidance |
Live |
| What is enforced, and what cannot be | GET /frp/methodology |
Live |
| Plan completeness against the eight elements | GET /frp/plans/{id}/completeness |
Live |
| Financial-year calendar, resolved per jurisdiction | GET/PUT /frp/calendar | Live |
| Quality impact, derived or self-declared | GET /qia/scheme-impact |
Live |
| QIPP schemes folded in on read | /icb-commissioning/qipp |
Live |
Not verified against published guidance. The
HFMA guide, the NHS efficiency map and NHS England revenue finance guidance are
cited in the requirements this module was built from. hfma.org.uk
and england.nhs.uk are both refused by this build environment's
egress policy (measured: 403 at CONNECT), so the principles encoded here are
taken from the requirements as supplied and
verified_against_published_guidance is false in the API.
Asserting conformance from an unread source is not something this product does.
Cash flow, the I&E account and the balance sheet are out of scope and are not synthesised. commvita records that they are required. It does not produce them, and it does not infer cash impact from a savings value.
What commvita cannot supply. The guidance's own four success factors are openness, involvement and communication, managerial capacity, and sound financial management. commvita can lay the true scale bare, name owners at every level, surface accountability gaps as exceptions, and enforce validation — it cannot make an organisation willing to publish the position, engage clinicians, supply leadership, or replace effective financial management. A well-structured plan can still be the wrong plan.