Five tips to add value to your school’s finance team
With significant education sector experience within our team, at Access Group we are all too familiar with the struggles that come with budget cuts and the demand for greater efficiency within schools.
Whether you currently work in a maintained school, single academy trust or multi academy trust, when budgets are stretched you need to make sure that you are getting the most out of your finance team and enabling them to make positive changes across your organisation.
Getting the basics right
School finances are getting stretched further and balancing the books is increasingly difficult. With pressure from local authorities and trust boards to ensure that budgets are delivered accurately and on time, it is essential to ensure the basics are done to a high standard. If your finance team is struggling with basic processes and day-to-day organisation, consider offering training or mentoring to understand why, and to find a strategy that works.
Culture
Strong company cultures have been directly linked to higher rates of productivity. According to research by Deloitte, 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct corporate culture is important to a business’ success.
Establishing a culture of continuous improvement will empower staff to identify waste, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. Think about building flexibility into your finance team by multi-skilling staff. If staff are able to perform tasks outside of their day-to-day remit, they can meet varying demands and requirements in workload when needed.
Centralising finance teams
The growth in academisation has led many schools to centralise their finance teams within a multi-academy trust (MAT). One of the major benefits of a MAT is that it will deliver a fully-qualified central finance team with a Chief Finance Officer overseeing budgets and financial forecasts across all academies. While this may not be a viable solution for every school, joining a MAT offers the chance to cut costs on finance while still benefiting from a fully-qualified team.
Monitor and review
It is good practice to regularly monitor and review the success of your finance team. If you have implemented a new process, provided staff training or established a culture of improvement, have you noticed a positive impact? Be sure to measure this progress over time, you finance department could be enhanced further.
Think about setting up regular performance meetings to ensure staff feel able to voice concerns. This way you can also request feedback on what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to amend processes as and when necessary.
Implementing technology
A study by the National Association of School Business Management highlighted needlessly time-consuming tasks as one of the biggest issues impacting the efficiency of finance departments. Introducing innovative software, such as Access Education, can instantly eliminate a number of costly and inefficient processes.
This technology has been designed by industry experts who understand the challenges facing education professionals, and can be tailored for individual schools and multi-academy trusts with training and ongoing support available.
Financial software like this allows you to centralise employee records and easily manage a number of areas including expenses, timesheets, training and the management of payroll services. This can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on paperwork and admin tasks, enabling your finance team to focus on more productive and value-adding activities.
With the challenges facing education finance professionals unlikely to disappear any time soon, it is vital that schools can enable staff to spend their time making worthwhile change, rather than being tied down by admin tasks.
