School Accounting

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How can we help you

How can we help you

Faced with all that is happening in a typical school, it is little wonder that many head teachers find the finances to be the proverbial “final straw.”  It is hardly surprising, too, that most administrative officers charged with looking after the school’s finances find it almost impossible to give the task their undivided attention, never mind interpreting and complying with the Local Authority’s (LA’s) many and varied requirements, given the constant interruptions to their time and concentration.

So how can SAFS help you?  With a friendly and informal approach to helping schools, SAFS will take you through the financial issues that are exercising your mind and help you to identify the possible solutions.  SAFS can help to ease the burden on the finance/administrative officer by explaining the intricacies of their responsibilities in a clear and straightforward manner and giving practical and hands-on assistance where required.

Meeting Individual Needs

We know, from our work with schools across the country, that every school is unique.    Our approach in each one differs according to the needs of the Head, the finance/administrative officer and the governors.  For example, we have helped a number of schools recover from significant budget deficits, helped others to overcome the long term absence of their finance/administrative officer, helped yet others to establish proper systems and controls and provided accurate and timely budget monitoring information to them all to assist them with their overall planning.

Strategic Planning – Budgeting – DCSF/LA Initiatives – CFR

We can help with your strategic planning, through detailed short and medium term budget planning, identifying costs and helping you to make the best and most effective use of the resources available to you.  We can help you to understand how the new initiatives coming from the Government, the DfES and the LA might impact on your school.  We can help your finance/administrative officer to understand the requirements of new developments such as Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) and make better use of the tools available to him/her, including your accounting software.

OfSTED - Audit  - FMSiS

We can help you prepare for OfSTED, and will make every effort to ensure a presence in the school when you are being audited and then help you to implement any recommendations the auditor may make.  We can also assist you with the preparation of the documentation required for your FMSiS assessment.

Training

We can help with the training of governors, the professional development of the Head, assist senior teaching staff undertaking the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) and the finance/administrative officer (who may be undertaking his/her own professional studies).  We have an established FMSiS training progrmme for both school management and governors which can be delivered on an individual school and group basis.

Contact with the School

We understand how busy the Head’s schedule is and work to fit in with that, through the careful timing of visits to the school, through telephone and e-mail contact and by keeping to our agreements with you for the timing of visits and the provision of information.

We will put our experience, knowledge and contacts at your disposal to ensure that you receive the service you need to run your school to the highest possible financial standard.

Further Information

If you want to know more, please contact David Waller on 07782 206017 to arrange a mutually convenient, no obligation, meeting at which you can outline your requirements and we will identify the strategies we can adopt to help.  If, after that, you think we can help, we can discuss the charge for the service, whether for a one-off solution to a particular problem, or for a longer term programme of support.

As you will understand, without first talking to you, to develop an understanding of your needs, we are unable to provide a “price list” for a service which we want to be tailored to your exact requirements

We look forward to an opportunity to meet you.