Education: Carmel College passes accounting test with flying colours
Accounting demands can be an ongoing test of patience for New Zealand schools. For North Shore's Carmel College - and many others - Greentree holds the answers...
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Old-school accounting was relatively simple before bulk funding gave New Zealand schools' boards of trustees a crash course in small business accounting. Nowadays, trustee-parents add accountant to their list of day jobs and/or boards employ a part-time business and planning manager - like Kaye Curran at Carmel College - to help manage their school’s finances and compliance requirements. Since every school is a stand-alone business, it must prepare monthly and year-end accounts which must be audited and presented to all stakeholders for examination and sign-off before moving into the next financial year. It’s at this point things get frustrating. School accounting pain The accounting system Curran inherited was incredibly inflexible as the period had to remain open until all adjustments had been entered and audited. Apart from this she could only ever present accounts to the board which were two months old, which was well after anything could be done to avoid a potential departmental budget blow-out or identify funds which could be better spent elsewhere. The situation was hardly helpful in terms of proactive financial planning and decision making. After evaluating and eliminating systems which were simply beyond the school budget and/or too unwieldy for school accounting purposes, Greentree was chosen. Curran drew upon the referential experiences of other schools and national school business services provider, Multiserve, who were existing Greentree users before making the final decision. Now there is no more waiting around for auditors to grace the school with their presence or be bullied by a bossy accounting system. Working with the flexibility of Greentree’s multi-period multi-year posting, Curran can now access the accounts at any time in any year and adjustments can be easily made for year-end changes. 'Today' versus historical financial reporting Being fully integrated to Excel the system can publish a report directly to an Excel spreadsheet and vice versa. It means that a wide variety of reports for different audiences, such as individual teaching departments, can be quickly and easily produced. It’s also simple to update reports as requirements change. With future expansion planned the school has the option of running dual budgets to track their building programme. School management will track and review progress of the original budget and update target performances in a second budget. This will help identify any potential deviations from the original budget and prevent blow-outs. Budgeting in general is easier and is providing greater clarity for heads of department. For example, rather than simply showing one budget for all art activities the system will show budgets for the various art courses such as photography or sculpture. By providing differentiated information the teaching staff at Carmel will be able to track curriculum expenditure and monitor budget levels more accurately. Smooth transition from the old to the new As far as Curran is concerned Greentree has delivered all it promised and made her job more flexible and has removed tedious manual processing which was taking up large amounts of time. Curran says that overall, “Excel integration and reporting has freed up large chunks of my time that were previously spent keying batches of transactions.” She now spends time on more proactive and progressive tasks like mapping school income and spending trends which enables the board to see exactly when most of the school’s fee funding comes in from parents and goes out in programme costs. Being able to map spending trends is complementary and insightful information which helps demystify the inner workings of school accounting and empowers the board’s decision making process. Curran has no doubt about the decision to go with Greentree. For more information www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/carmel_college.cfm Graham Hill Further Reading
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