FITS - Financial Management

Before you can implement Financial Management you must assign roles and responsibilities to appropriate staff in the school.   Assigning roles and responsibilities in financial management offers some suggestions and guidance.

After you have assigned roles and responsibilities, it is important to ensure that those participating in the implementation and subsequent operation of the process understand what is required of them.  Use this website as part of your training.

Set a start date.  A 'go-live' date is important in any implementation. Make sure that you allow enough time to do all the preparatory tasks before your 'go-live' date.

Of course, communication must take place within the implementation team, to agree plans, scheduled dates, and so on. However, it is also important to communicate externally and inform the user community of the new process.

The implementation of a process can be seen as a change just like the upgrading of a server and the impact on the user community should be communicated to them clearly in advance of the change.

Before you can go ahead with the implementation, prepare all the materials required for the process. Make sure that you have downloaded the templates you need and that everyone involved has access to them. 

To pilot the financial management process, it may be a good idea to make one person responsible for recording all expenditure to start with.  It may be necessary to restrict purchasing ability to the same person to ensure that all transactions are recorded.  In this case you need to make sure that all other members of the team are aware of any changes to previous purchasing rules for the duration of the pilot.

Once this process is working effectively with one person, you should then be able to implement it across the team if you wish to give everyone the authority to purchase the necessary items.  You may feel at this stage that having one person responsible for purchasing is enough and this is fine. But don't forget about cover for absence: other members of the team should be trained to take over if this happens.

There are no prerequisites for financial management.  The sooner you start to record all the costs of ICT, the sooner you will be able to identify areas where cost reduction may be possible.

Person with overall responsibility for ICT and technical support, such as: ICT manager

Anyone with authority to spend against the ICT/technical support budget must assume the role of financial administrator.  They must notify the financial manager of their expenditure.