Because it costs me very little to run, and because a school that uses it well is a school I'd want to work with. That's the whole answer. Here's the longer version.
I'm Asad, an accountant. Fifteen years in finance, building systems and processes for large e-commerce operations and private companies.
I sat on my son's school governing body for two years. I expected the hard part to be the decisions. It wasn't. The hard part was that there were no tools.
Parents were giving up their evenings to govern a school — people who genuinely wanted the best for their children — and they were doing it off a photocopied spreadsheet with numbers nobody could interrogate. Good people making million-rand decisions, flying blind. That bothered me more than I expected it to.
Not from this. SchoolBudget is free, permanently, with nothing held back — no paid tier, no locked report, no premium benchmark.
I earn my living compiling annual financial statements. Some schools that use this tool eventually ask me to do theirs. If neither ever happens, the tool still does its job.
The benchmark only works if schools use it. Every school that fills it in makes the comparison sharper for the next one. That's the only reason I ask you to share it — not for leads, but because a benchmark built on thirty schools is a guess and one built on three hundred is useful.
It costs nothing, and it makes the whole sector a little stronger.
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