School Finance Management: How to Manage it Effectively?

Struggling To Manage Your School Finances Effectively? Here Is How A School Finance Management Software Can Help You

Financial management is one of the most fundamental practices in any enterprise or business including schools and other educational institutes. Financial management essentially means planning, organizing, directing and controlling the financial activities in schools so that the financial resources are used in an efficient and effective manner.

Financial management ensures that the administration and management team are able to manage the budget in a better manner and make informed decisions related to the school budget.

Unlike a business organization, in a school setting, financial management has three key segments to it:

1. Student Fees Management

For the school finance team, student fees are a large part of the financial management and School Finance Management Tool helps to ease the process of student fees management in a number of ways:

A. Create Fees:
Creating and calculating the fees for a school full of students can be a tedious affair. If done manually, the administration team has to take into account the class of the student, sibling discounts, additional discounts, transportation fees, hostel fees, and many other such elements. However, with the help of a school finance management software not only does this calculation become easier but the automated system helps eliminate human errors – thus making the process of creating and calculating fees easy and error-free.

B. Schedule Fees:
The school finance management software also helps to schedule the fees and send out an automatic reminder to the parents about payment for the same. The software helps to automate the fee invoicing process, scheduling it and generating fees due to reports as and when needed.

C. Check Fees Defaulter:
This module of the school finance management software allows for the finance team to easily get a quick update on the students whose fees are pending. The system can also be set up to send reminders to parents about pending fees or even any other school-related payment. Fee defaulters report can be checked and the can be reminded about the pending fees via sms/email.

D. Check Fees Structure And Fee Refunds:
In a school system, it is very common for the school fees to vary from student to student depending on a number of variables such as class, sibling discount, facilities available such as a hostel, canteen, transport, etc. In this scenario, the school finance management app helps the team to check the fees structure accurately and issue out refunds when needed.

E. Fees Report Such As Batch Wise And Students Wise:
One of the biggest advantages of a school finance management system is that it takes the pressure of making and submitting reports. The administration team can use the school finance management software to create and edit reports related to fees. These reports can be easily customized as per the needs of each school.

2. Staff Payroll Management:

Schools also have many employees and staff ranging from teachers, administration staff, department heads, trained and untrained support staff, various specialists, counselors, etc. This staff Payroll Management System helps the school to manage and deal with the financial aspects of staff salary, taxation calculation, special allowances, deductions, gross pay, net pay, etc.

The software also offers employee Attendance Management for easy salary computation at the end of the month. Besides attendance data, the software also takes into account variables like mid-year salary revision data. Additionally, it can be customized according to the school’s various policies such as pay policy, leave and benefits policy, attendance policy to calculate the final pay towards the end of each month.

A. Generate Payslip:
The school management system with the finance and staff management module helps to easily generate a payslip towards the end of each month. This payslip is personalized for every employee depending on his salary. Generating this same payslip manually towards the end of each month is not only a tedious affair but it is also prone to human errors and miscalculations.

B. Pay Slip Reports:
Besides generating monthly payslips, the staff payroll management system can also generate pay slip reports for the school. The reports can be easily customized and can be generated with ease and minimum effort.

C. Approve And Reject The Employees Pay Slip:
This is another benefit of the staff payroll management system as employee payslips can be easily approved or rejected by the employees. The employees can view their payslip from their profile and can either reject it, add remarks over it or approve it and get a PDF of the same.

D. Create Payroll Group:
Payroll groups define the payroll structure of the employees based on the payroll categories added to the group. Sometimes a single payroll schedule may not fit the requirements of an institution. This option allows the school HR team to create different payroll groups, to group employees who have a common payroll structure, payment frequency, and LOP calculation method. Each payroll group created must be processed separately. 

3. School Account Management:

The School Finance Management System offers school and educational institutes a broad selection of features that empowers them with the ability to manage and control their accounts more effectively.

A. Financial Reports:
This feature allows the school finance team to view the various transactions for a customizable period of time. The reports show all the existing categories of income and expenses with an ability to view and generate reports in complete detail such as discounts, fines, etc.

B. Transaction Management:
The system allows for common transactions that are done in the school to be recorded by creating custom categories. Similarly, custom categories can be created forever new expenses and new incomes. The system also makes it easy to revert manage donations taxes and for easy asset and liability management.