Feedback please -  contributions conditions calculator

After struggling to check someone’s eligibility in one fairly borderline case, I have attempted a generic contributions conditions calculator for ESA and JSA in Excel. (We are not satisfied the DWP are always getting it right.)

Please could someone who understands the conditions check to see if my formulas are applying the correct test? Once it’s working correctly I’ll make it available on here.

I’ve run a few scenarios through it and it produced the right result each time.  Well done.  I’m sure that will be very helpful for advisers.

One small issue for me was when one of the years satisfies the 2nd contribution condition and the other doesn’t, the message that appears against “Both” is “not satisfied”.  In reality, one year is satisfied in those circs (and I appreciate that the spreadsheet shows you in grade out which one of those years it is) but wouldn’t it be better to replace the heading “both” with “Overall”.  A very minor issue though and spreadsheet could remain as it is for me.  Well done again.

edit: Ah, you’d then have change your existing “Overall” heading to something else.  Might be best to leave it as it is.  One other thing: the date of claim box is really the date of start of pLCW which is not necessarily the same thing but I’m sure you’re using the “date of claim” for simplicity.  Perhaps a note advising that date of claim = date of current claim unless there was an earlier award that ended within the last 12 weeks.

Thanks very much Tom. I’ve made a few changes to clarify those points - but mainly glad the substantive calculations seem to be correct.