This course builds on the basic principles established in the academy finance for beginners course. It is designed to help both those with financial and non-financial backgrounds actively participate in financial planning, monitoring and reporting matters. You will come away with practical tools, tips and understanding of academy finance to help implement straight away.
Academy Trust finance can be daunting with a lot of information to digest and understand all whilst keeping the budget balanced. Many new to academy finance are unprepared and untrained to take on this complex and demanding role. This course will provide you with some additional important aspects that you need to know in additional to those taught on the beginners course.
The course will look at budgeting and provide some practical tips on how to build an effective annual 3-year budget. The session will also look at some of the key funding streams (including capital), explaining how these are calculated. We will also recap on some of the accounting treatments for these funding streams followed by a practical session.
The treatment of the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) in statutory accounts causes great confusion – the course will help break the myths that this adjustment impacts your year end roll-over and is truly just a paper liability.
We will review some management accounts – looking at how these can be interpreted. This will give you insight into the types of questions third parties may raise so you can adequately prepare your responses in advance.
Finally, the course will stress the importance of ensuring postings are correct in your accounts and the impact a mis-posting can have upon your reporting to trustees and the executive team.
KEY LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This session will enable you to:
Go into budget season more confident with a clear plan of how to approach this daunting task
Offer support and guidance on the application and understanding of funding streams plus a re-cap of the basic key accounting concepts
Clearly understand the impact the LGPS has on your statutory accounts so you can clearly articulate to trustees
Provide opportunities to discuss your role and responsibilities with a network of other finance personnel
Be confident in preparing for committee meetings and pre-empt any awkward questions from trustees concerning your management accounts
Review for mis-postings and explain to your teams why this is important to avoid
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
School Business Managers and Chief Financial Officers newly appointed to the role. Other members of the trust finance team. Chief Executive Officers, governors, directors and trustees from academies are also welcome to attend.
FACILITATOR
Phil has 15 years’ experience in the academies sector as an auditor, CFO and governor. From 2012 to 2022 Phil was an auditor in a top 30 firm of accountants supporting finance teams as the sector developed and matured. He also was finance governor in a local school which went through academy conversion. He now acts as a part-time CFO whilst providing internal audit and training services to trusts.
