Data submission best practice
To assist you through the busy period of final submission and sign-off dates we've pulled together some best practice tips to help you.
Deadlines
Meeting your deadlines is a statutory requirement and any failure to do so will be reported to your Primary Regulator. Remember, Liaison are here to help you, please contact us if you require any assistance with meeting your deadlines.
Coding Manual
The Coding Manual for your collection contains an abundance of information and guidance to help you complete the return, and includes:
- Support guides.
- Collection key dates.
- Data items.
- Quality rules directory, with plain English explanations.
IDS roles
It's good practice to check that you have resilience in place, ensure more than one person at your Provider has the Submitter and Query role in the Identity System, visit the IDS support guide for a reminder of each role and what they mean.
Make sure you know who your Data Collection Record Contact is. They are the first point of communication for HESA during a data collection and are responsible for overseeing a provider's data submission process and ensuring that deadlines are met.
Data quality
Did you know that addressing Issue Management System queries can involve a multi stage process? If you, or we, identify an error in your submission then you will need to request a de-commit and upload/commit a new file.
Or we may need to contact your Primary Regulator to seek further guidance. This dialogue and iterative process can take several days. These tips will help smooth this process:
- Please respond to your Issue Management System queries with full explanations.
- If you require a switch for any of your errors, please request these in plenty of time and when you have a full file submitted.
- When a query is raised, notifications from the Issue Management System are sent to the Record Contact.
- You may get queries from HESA and/or your Primary Regulator, please respond to all of them.
- Remember to review your targets from last year.
- Please do not send any personal data via email or through the Issue Management System, instead reference HUSID numbers.
- Your credibility reports and quality rules can be found in the Data Collection System.
- The Issue Management System user guide can provide more guidance for you.
Re-submitting your data
When you have re-submitted your data, we aim to check your file as quickly as possible however, during busy periods, this can take 3-5 days. You will need to factor this into your working practices and strategies. Your re-submitted data may also generate further Issue Management System queries and need to follow the outlined process before they are closed by HESA/ Primary Regulator.
The above highlights the importance of starting the process early and keeping the momentum going right the way through to the Last Submission deadline (detailed in your communication). If you are having concerns about meeting your deadline, please let us know as soon as possible by contacting our Liaison team:
E [email protected]
T + 44 (0) 1242 388 531