Financial Management Standard in Schools

Due to legislated documentation and pressure from governors schools MUST demonstrate accurate tracking and management of school assets to comply with regular audits. Schools often find this costly and time consuming.

Budgeting & cost savings

Often schools don't know what specific equipment they have in which departments or locations. Schools often overspend, buying too much new equipment or software when they have the spare capacity elsewhere.

Software exposure

Schools have a real concern around software licensing being out of date, or overspending on software unnecessarily. Antivirus update logging has also been highlighted as a real concern. Independent research suggests that with proper monitoring in place software requirements could be reduced by up to 35%.

Equipment auditing

Most schools find auditing assets using their existing methods very time consuming and laborious. Using current methods, if logged at all, new equipment is often documented manually in a single location, sometimes using Excel, but often on paper. This causes difficulty, often meaning that FMSIS regulations cannot be met.

Equipment disposal

Regulations are in place to ensure that schools dispose of I.T. equipment correctly, this includes safely disposing of broken items and the selling on of existing equipment. Disposal must be accurate, legitimate and in the best interest of the school, this then has to be reported and logged and can be independently audited under legislation. This whole process is often time consuming.

Crisis management & disaster recovery

In the event of a major fire most schools find their asset register is destroyed. This causes tremendous difficulty in administering insurance claims quickly. It also leaves a major deficiency in most schools crisis management planning.

Risk Assessment and PAT testing

Risk assessing thousands of assets across the school is very time consuming but necessary. One example is the need for accurate logging of PAT tested assets. Schools find it difficult to generate up-to-date renewal reports easily, which can cause exposure under risk assessment.

Academy accounting

Academies have to be run like a business with a balance sheet and need to accurately know the value of all the assets in the school. Typically schools find this difficult, costly and time consuming.

I.T. job reporting

School I.T. departments often have a significant backlog of equipment faults, repairs and software updates to undertake. Most schools need more streamlined methods of handling both asset repair and upgrade history, along with improved methods of communication with each asset guardian.