Financial Self Assessment

In our work of conducting finance function assessments, we’ve found it’s often hard for school Boards and others who don’t work every day on school finance to accurately gauge the health of a school’s financials and finance office. Sure, when cash flow is an issue, bills aren’t getting paid, and the Board is meeting without updated financial reports - that is easy to identify as a problem. The hard part is figuring out financial weaknesses and inefficiencies when things are working ok. Is the school financially strong or is it just scraping by? Are there challenges looming around the corner? Is the business office running efficiently? Do the school’s processes reflect current best practices? While it may be hard for Boards and leadership to assess their school’s financial health when it is functional, that’s the best time to mitigate risk.  To help with that conundrum, we have developed a quick EdOps School Financial Health Self Assessment that identifies the most important financial metrics and best practices. We’ve come up with this list based on our work with over a hundred schools around the country. 

Schools of course differ in many, many ways, but the basics of school financial health remain the same. We invite you to take 15 minutes to fill out our self assessment and get a better sense of the financial health of your school. We have kept the financial jargon low so that anyone responsible for stewarding the financial resources of school can complete it (and if you don’t know the answer to a question, then we hope this pushes you to find it out). No models, ratios or fancy calculations required. Your responses are confidential, will not be shared, and will be emailed to you. Please click here to get started.

[This post contributed by Leigh Carey, Senior Finance Specialist; Natalia Bovkun, COO; and Vera Krimnus, Director, People Operations.]