At this stage of the 2025/26 National Cost Collection (NCC) cycle, most NHS costing teams are focused on one thing: building the dataset that will underpin the entire submission, and for many organisations, the work has only just begun.
Across finance, costing and informatics teams, the priority is assembling year-end data from multiple sources, ensuring that financial, workforce and activity data align, and setting up the structures needed to support the new cycle. This includes reviewing and aligning cost centres, mapping activity flows, and confirming allocation approaches.
While this work can feel operational, it is an important step. At this point in the cycle, the objective is to create a dataset that is complete, consistent and ready to work with.
However, the quality of this early-stage work has a direct impact on everything that follows. The way data is structured, governed and brought together now determines how smoothly the submission process runs, and how useful the outputs will ultimately be.
Well-governed input data enables costing outputs that are:
- Reliable, trusted by both finance and operational teams, reducing time spent questioning the numbers
- Meaningful, reflecting true resource consumption rather than artefacts of inconsistent structures or assumptions
- Insightful, capable of supporting decision-making, performance discussions and improvement initiatives
Without this foundation, teams often face challenges later in the cycle. Validation becomes more complex, requiring manual adjustments and workarounds. Explaining results takes longer, as stakeholders need reassurance on how the data has been constructed. And opportunities to use costing outputs more strategically can be harder to realise.
Conversely, when the groundwork is done well, the benefits carry through the entire process. Submission becomes more straightforward, with fewer surprises during validation. More importantly, once the NCC is complete, teams are better positioned to move quickly into interpretation and insight.
Although analysis is not the immediate focus, it is the inevitable next step. Questions around cost variation, benchmarking, and productivity will follow. The extent to which organisations can answer these questions confidently depends heavily on the strength of the data foundations established at the outset. In practice, this means that early-stage NCC activity is not just about gathering data. It is about creating structure, clarity and governance that will enable the data to be used effectively later on.
At LOGEX, the focus at this stage is on supporting organisations to bring these elements together in a way that is both practical and sustainable. By prioritising data quality and consistency early in the cycle, costing teams can reduce complexity later and ensure that their outputs are not only compliant, but genuinely useful.
Because while the NCC submission is an important milestone, the real value lies in what organisations are able to do with the data once it is complete.
