The establishment your DBF actually funds, a ten-year trajectory you can argue with rather than admire, and reorganisation proposals that freeze the figures they were discussed on — so the numbers in the minutes are still the numbers in the system.
Most deployment conversations fail because those three things live in three documents that disagree. Here each one is built from the one below it.
Every managed post with how it is paid — stipendiary, part-time, house for duty, self-supporting, externally funded — matched to its benefice, its job category and the person holding it. Vacancies are the funded posts nobody is in, not every empty row in the sheet.
Target establishment against what the register projects, with the historic church-life series behind it. Retirements, ordinations, curacy completion and replacement rates are assumptions you set on the page and watch redraw — not appendices in a paper.
A proposal captures the attendance, income, share, ministry cost and population figures at the moment it was saved. Two proposals over the same parishes are offered side by side automatically. The numbers a meeting discussed stay the numbers on the record.
Deployment is decided post by post, in a room, with somebody defending a benefice. The tooling has to work at that grain.
Change a post’s FTE, date a departure, drop a funded role or add one that does not exist yet — and the whole projection redraws. Each suggestion belongs to a scenario, so the same person can be modelled differently in two competing plans.
Retirement age, assumed ordination age, curacy completion rate, replacements a year, whether curates fill vacant posts. Every one is on the page with its effect visible, and the page says plainly which figures are assumptions rather than data.
Attendance, worshipping community, electoral roll and parish share continued forward at an annual percentage you choose — drawn as a dashed line so nobody mistakes your assumption for a forecast from the data.
Proposed groupings carry attendance per stipendiary FTE, share required against ministry cost, and cover across the parishes — the ratios a deployment board actually argues over.
Ministry cost modelled per full-time equivalent with stipend, on-costs, housing and CMD as separate inputs, so a diocese can put its own DBF figures in and see its own numbers.
A proposal that gains support hands off into the pastoral project — interested parties, stage checklist and scheme reference — with its own reference recorded against it for the trail. Pastoral planning →
Getting this wrong in software is how a thinking-out-loud exercise ends up quoted as a decision.
The trajectory, the deployment table and a proposal with its evidence pack.
The hard part of deployment was never the arithmetic. It was that everybody in the room had a different spreadsheet, and none of them agreed on what a vacancy was.— Why the register, not the sheet, is the source of the vacancy figure