Six questions. Ten rules. One honest answer.
Budget season runs on guesswork and last year's spreadsheet. Answer six questions about your school and you'll get a marked report card, the rules your budget breaks, a one-pager for the governing body and a draft letter to parents — in about ten minutes.
Fee income
How many learners, and what do you charge them? Split them into segments — normal students, aftercare, morning care — so each fee type carries its own numbers. Type the fee you are budgeting for next year in rands; put what parents pay now in the history panel alongside, and the increase works itself out. Nothing is captured twice, so nothing can disagree.
Salary bill
What does your staff cost, and what have you promised? Type the whole year you are budgeting for — last year goes in the panel alongside, and the increase between them is worked out.
New posts
Each new position with its full package. These are next year's figures, so the increase above is not applied to them.
Reserve fund
What are you setting aside, and how far would it stretch?
Repairs & maintenance
What are you spending on the buildings?
Upgrades & expansion
What capital work is planned?
Other income
What comes in that isn't fees? This is the lever most schools never pull. Enter the monthly and the annual works itself out — or the other way. If aftercare is already a fee segment in question 1, its line here is holiday programmes only; counting it twice flatters the budget.
Other costs
The costs that are not salaries, maintenance or capital work — kept apart from income so neither hides in the other.
Aftercare and meals — the two increases that must move together
Aftercare income sits above. The food that feeds it sits in your costs. If the fee goes up 6% and food goes up 11%, aftercare is quietly being paid for out of school fees.
Big costs worth naming
Rent, software subscriptions, edu care, stationery — the two or three lines the committee will ask about. If you name a cost here, take it out of the one total below so it is not counted twice.
Everything else it costs to open the gates
If things go slightly wrong
| Stress test | Resulting position |
|---|
The ten in-principle rules
Each one is tested against the numbers you entered. The breaches are what the treasurer takes to the finance committee.
What I'm asking you to approve
The one page your governing body actually needs. The left side is always built from your figures; copy it across and make the right side your own — it is never overwritten.
The letter to parents
Built from your own figures on the left. Copy it to the right and make it your own before it goes out — your version is never overwritten.
Forecast per year
Where the bank balance and the reserve fund are heading — this year month by month, then the three years after it. The years ahead assume every increase you have budgeted happens again each year.
This year, month by month
Reserve fund at each year end
What the reserve fund is worth at the end of each year, if the contribution you have budgeted is repeated every year. The months under each bar are how long the school could run on it.
Bank balance at each year end
Money left in the bank, after the reserve contribution has been moved across. A bar below the line means the school runs out of money that year.
What this says
Share your budget with me to review
Send me the budget you have just built. I read it properly — the figures, the marks, the rules it breaks — and come back to you with general feedback, a discovery call, and an estimate in hours for any work you want done. Sharing it costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Benchmark (only you can see this)
Anonymous medians from schools in the same learner band. Hidden from the public until the dataset has enough schools to be honest.
Skipping costs you nothing — the report card, one-pager and letter above are already yours. Either way your six figures join the medians. Your school’s name never does.
Build the budget in Excel
This is the working file your bookkeeper or accountant carries on from — seven tabs, live formulas, and every figure already in place.
- Budget Report — the full chart of accounts in the layout a school governing body expects, with two prior-year columns and an increase column that fills itself once you paste last year in.
- Monthly Budget — every line phased across January to December. Fees run over their fee months, the 13th cheque sits in its month, projects land where you put them.
- Actuals and Monitoring — type what really happened; the monitoring tab compares it to the budget for the months completed, and projects the year-end off the phasing rather than dividing by twelve and hoping.
- Fee Detail, Workings and Assumptions — the sums behind the big numbers: how each fee was built, the meals and salary workings, and every rate the budget rests on.
Every line carries an account reference number — fees 1010 up, other income 1100s, expenses 2000s, reserve and capital 3000s. Running costs arrive already spread across the accounts a South African school actually keeps: lease, electricity and water, cleaning, security, insurance, photocopier, accounting and audit, staff welfare, teaching aids and classroom costs per class. Change any of them, rename them, add your own rows with new codes — then import the file back and the tool re-marks the compiled budget. Your names, your amounts and your month-by-month phasing all come back with it.
- Your school's actual figures, worked through live
- Where school budgets are actually exposed, in plain language
- Costing planned maintenance and special projects with real accuracy, so they stop arriving as surprises
- Monitoring the budget beyond divide-by-twelve-and-hope — phased around the events and activities your year actually holds
- Building the reserve at a pace that is fair to this year's parents and honest about what the school needs
The full budget
Step 3 — every line, ready for ExcelEverything you captured in the stages, laid out the way a governing body reads it. Amounts from the suggested split are editable right here; lines that come from a stage link back to it. Type last year into the prior columns and the increase works itself out — in the tool and in the Excel.
Three versions of the same budget — a base, a careful one, a bold one. Switching keeps each version's figures separate. Name them so the committee knows which is which, and copy one into another when you want to start from what you already have.
Where the bank and reserve stand, month by month
Income lands in its months, costs go out in theirs — this is the bank balance that results, next to the reserve building up.
Track the year against the budget
A budget you never look at again is a wish. Save this year's budget, then come back each term and enter what actually happened.
Sign in to save your budget
Your figures stay attached to your account so you can reopen them in March. The Budget Tool itself never needs a sign-in.
Share the tool with your committee
Up to ten people — the treasurer, governing body members, the bookkeeper — can sign in with their own Google accounts and work on this budget. You decide what each may do: view everything, update, or view only the parts you choose. Save the budget first, then save the team.
They open tool.schoolbudget.co.za, sign in with the email you list here, and your budget appears under "Budgets shared with you". Removing a person here removes their access the moment you save.
Financial health check
A budget tells you what you plan to do. This tells you where you actually stand. Six figures, taken on one day, and you get a read on two things that decide whether a school survives a bad year: what it is worth, and what cash is genuinely its own.
Your bank statements and your last set of financial statements will give you all six. If a figure is a rough estimate, enter the estimate — a rough answer to the right question beats a precise answer to the wrong one.
What this means for next year's budget
This is the point of doing it. Numbers from a real bank statement are worth more than an assumption typed into a budget.
Logging keeps a dated copy of the six figures so future-you can look back. Signed in, the log saves with your budget; one entry per date — logging the same date again replaces it.
Year by year
The latest logged figures from each year, side by side. The brass bar is the most recent.