The largest source of expenditure within a school is staffing costs which typically account for over 70% of the expenditure budget.
How the finance module helps project and report employee costs is covered
in the employee section of the website the projected costs can be used in
forward planning to predict increases/decreases in expenditure. Other costs can be predicted using historical data from the
school and inflation percentages, for example the cost of rates (water, electricity, etc) which could remain stable and only change with inflation.
Every income and expense account used in the finance module has the option to generate budgets in forward planning in four ways:
N - Do Not Generate New Budgets Automatically For This Account
F - Use Final Budget
O - Use Original Budget
A - Use Actual (Outturn) Amount
accounts holding staff expenditure are typically set as N so budgets are not generated, unless a user projects employee costs from the employee sections, which can be done upto ten years
in the future. Using one of the other options means future budgets can be generated by the finance module with inflation.
General, Wage and Funding Inflation percentages can be set for upto ten years in the future. National Insurance variables such as earning thresholds and rebates can also be adjusted and these
changes will be used when projecting employee costs and oncosts for future years.
The Year - On - Year Report combines the budgets generated by forward planning to produce a report showing income and expenditure summary and details over a set of three years.