Guest Article: Neil Murphy (Schoolfinance.ie)

Eight years ago, for my sins, I became treasurer of The Board of Management of our local school. I realised very quickly that keeping and updating school accounts took up far too much time and energy. Coming from an I.T background, I knew there had to be an easier way to do what is essentially a simple and straightforward job.
With invaluable support from our Principal, I set about developing a web-based system for managing our school accounts. My aim back then and my aim now remain the same; our system has to make your life easier.
Schoolfinance is designed exclusively for use in Irish Primary Schools. As it is hosted on the Internet, you have access to your school accounts anywhere there is a computer and an internet connection.  From first log on, our system is ready to go and can be tailored to suit the individual needs of your school.
We continue to look for ways to make Schoolfinance even easier to use and all upgrades are included in the original price. The price you are quoted is the price you pay. There are no extra hidden costs.
Below are just some of the features available to every school

Payments or Income

Recording payments and income is just of matter of completing a simple form and allocating the transaction to a certain category. In this way you build up your own database of transactions which you can always access.

Finding information

You can easily search for particular items and your results can be printed or exported to excel if you wish to further examine your findings

Reports

There are 2 reporting options.

BOM Monthly report

This report can be run for any month or series of months and shows the opening balance at that time and details of all the payments and income in that period and a closing balance . Very useful for your Board of management meetings and can be simply produced in a few clicks.

Running Totals

This report is run from the start of any financial year up to any point in time and shows all the payments and income split over each category or grant. With this report you can easily see the amount you have left against each category or grant

Bank Reconciliation

This is a very important part of keeping your accounts in good shape. By reconciling your bank on a monthly basis you can save yourself a lot of time and effort at the end of the year. Schoolfinance.ie provides an easy platform to perform this task. When you receive your bank statement at the end of the month there is a facility so that you can easily mark each cheque as cashed as it appears on your bank statement and a calculation that will let you know what the difference between your bank and the system. This difference should be as close to zero as possible.

Year Ending

At the end of each financial year , usually 31st August your accounts should be certified by a qualified accountant. To save yourself some expense with this ensure that your accounts are reconciled as detailed above before handing it over to the accountant. Depending on how your accountant wants to deal with the accounts the following options are available
Set your accountant up as a read only user so that he/she can access all the information easily . This option may not suit everyone but is available and easy to do

Print off all payments and Income

Once your accountant has signed off on the prior year the system easily calculates the opening balances for the coming year.
We offer a 30 day free trial so that you can give the system a go and make sure it fits your needs. If need be we can come to your school and demonstrate all the features of the system . We are always available to answer any questions or queries by phone or email. Visit us at www.schoolfinance.ie today and take the first step in getting those accounts back on track.
Watch out for us at the IPPN Annual Principals’ Conference Expo 2012