Frequently asked questions

Designed from day one to be a complete end-to-end solution for the management and delivery of apprenticeships, Bud is easy to use and helps drive best practice across your business. It supports all aspects of successful apprenticeship delivery, including learning, funding and management.

Bud guides you through the regulatory maze, and simplifies the Levy, Frameworks & Standards, funding rules and more.

Bud brings together all the features needed to manage apprenticeships in the most efficient way possible. And uniquely, these features are now all in one place.

Bud helps clarify changes to apprenticeships such as the Levy and Standards. It gives you complete control by mapping best practice across your business with ease.

Bud intelligently drives best practice and efficient processes into your apprenticeship management and delivery. Bud combines technological excellence with the experience and insight of industry leaders recognised for best practice in quality and compliance.

Bud includes an intuitive, engaging VLE (Virtual Leaning Environment) and e-portfolio. It’s a simple and intuitive system delivering a great user experience and encouraging learner engagement. The system allows learners and trainers to interact and guide apprentices through their learning journey. And, with built-in, easy-to-understand progress tracking it helps guide the learner through to End-Point Assessment (EPA).

Bud begins with a strong curriculum

A strong curriculum lies at the heart of consistent EPA success. Through developing a strong and engaging curriculum and delivering a consistent and engaging experience to every learner, you can significantly increase your chance of success at EPA. That’s why we made sure that Bud enables you to create and deliver professional, consistent and scalable programmes, every time. With content and resources designed specifically for standards
built in, Bud gives you a head start.

Bud measures real progress

Bud’s Skill Scan assesses the learners starting point aligned to the standard and then tracks their progress against each KSB throughout the programme. Skills Scan provides an easy means of demonstrating “distance travelled” and true progress, giving you confidence in readiness for EPA.

Bud provides real time management information

Effective EPA management means that you need to have a complete and accurate view of your apprentices’ progress at any point in time.

Bud provides in-system dashboards for your trainers, operations managers and senior management creating at-a-glance visuals to highlight key actions and areas of greatest need. These highly accessible, real-time metrics add a critical focus to your operational delivery and ultimately your learner’s EPA success.

Yes.

Bud programme templates utilise the knowledge of our curriculum experts to further enhance the delivery of learning content via Bud.

Our templates set out the blue-print for delivery of a programme and contain all the learning content and resources required for a great learning experience.

With content fully mapped against the standards criteria, knowledge, skills and behaviours for each activity, along with the planned off the job hours.

Our premium templates take learning to the next level, designed from the ground up using best in class content editing tools, which will wow and engage your learners and employers.

Yes.

Bud provides a fast, simple and compliant eligibility and enrolment process, including initial skills and LRS integration. It’s completely paperless, captures digital signatures and enables you to track your candidate pipeline with ease. It comes with fully integrated and fast BKSB initial assessments and it’s simple and intuitive to use.

Bud brings together paperless enrolment, VLE, e-portfolio, built in compliance checking, funding management and reporting into a single seamless, joined-up process that eliminates the need for any other system.

Yes.

Bud automatically generates Individual Learner Records (ILR’s) with built in compliance checking to make sure that your claim matches your evidence.

Bud has built-in compliance processing management. It automatically generates electronic agreements with built-in digital signatures. Bud stores all your funding and compliance evidence in a compliant and audit-friendly format. Bud comes with a full audit trail that automatically tracks every change.

Bud tracks the progress of the learner in real-time against the planned activities and off-the-job hours. Overdue activities, reviews and falling below the minimum off-the-hours required for the learner is easily tracked and managed by skills coaches.

Real-time business intelligence gives you immediate performance management metrics and allows you to drill down to the detailed level to take action.

To offer a best in class service Bud has integrated with the most powerful business intelligence tool available on the market, Microsoft Power BI. This provides unparalleled visibility to the data that drives your business.

Through Power BI Bud provides a suite of reports and deep dive access into your data. These templates offer a one-click gateway to a comprehensive and wide array of essential operational information. Offering high-level and in-depth insight, this functionality transforms your visibility of performance, identifying strengths and weaknesses and informing strategic decision making.

Bud automatically generates electronic agreements with built-in digital signatures. It keeps all your funding and compliance evidence in a compliant and audit-friendly format. Bud provides a full audit trail that automatically tracks every change and electronically stores supporting evidence eliminating the need for any paperwork.

Bud tracks the progress of the learner in real-time against the planned activities and off-the-job hours. Overdue activities, reviews and falling below the minimum off-the-job hours required for the learner is easily tracked and managed.

Real-time business intelligence gives you immediate performance management metrics and allows you to drill down to the detailed level to take action.

Yes.

Bud values the privacy of our customers and keeping the personal information of learners and users safe and secure remains a top priority for us.

Bud holds Cyber Security plus certification, the UK government backed standard for Cyber Security.

Bud is also registered with the Information Commissioners Office under the Data Protection Act 2018 and our registration number is ZA420103

Bud delivers an excellent return on your investment by driving efficiency savings and improving performance.

Bud is priced on a per learner basis. There is a learner enrolment fee and then a monthly fee per learner. Volume discounts are also available.

Bud’s ALS workflows will help you to mitigate risks and gain confidence in ALS funding by:

• Dynamically highlighting potential learning support needs
• Defining and evidencing planned support
• Prompting trainers/skills coaches to plan and evidence provision of ALS
• Real-time tracking of overdue learning support
• Automatically claiming ALS funding through dynamic ILR management

Bud dynamically generates your electronic paperwork allowing you to store, access and manage your funding claim evidence in a single system.

With ILR generation, dashboards and reporting to help to keep all stakeholders informed you can have confidence in your funding claims. With built-in intelligence Bud ensures compliance with funding rules and comes with a simple fast system generated ILR.

With real-time reporting on revenue, funding sources and key accounts, Bud helps you measure progress against your financial targets.

Bud has the capability to rapidly import learners on to its platform.

Bud Standard Migration capability uses the ILR file as the basis for migration but augments it with additional data extracted from other systems. Data is cleansed where possible prior to loading in to Bud platform.

Bud Advanced Migration offering is a bespoke solution where the Bud consultants will work with the client to understand what in addition to the standard migration can be delivered and how the incumbent systems can be leveraged for data extraction.

Yes.

Bud is already integrated with a selection of third- party systems. We also have an open API that can be used to develop integrations with your own internal systems or external platforms. Contact us for our available APIs and systems integration support.

Our team of Apprenticeship Delivery Consultants work with you to plan and implement the system to suit your requirements. The setup time will depend upon the complexity of your requirements but typically takes between two to six weeks.

Bud services are supported by an in-house Technical Support Team, during business hours (9am – 5pm). Support tickets can be logged through the integrated Support portal or via email, and we target response within 24hrs of business days for Issues, Queries and Tasks raised.

We provide a self-service Knowledge Centre with key word search functionality to direct users to helpful information to assist with queries.