Airgead Bunscoile Free School Accounts Package by Seán Ó Laimhín, retired principal of Foxford NS, Co. Mayo and Airgead Bunscoile author and technical support
WHAT IS IT FOR? Airgead Bunscoile is an Excel-based accounting programme for primary schools available free of charge to IPPN members. It was developed as a resource for IPPN specifically to make life easier for principals. Even though the treasurer may be taking responsibility for the school accounts, most principals like to keep a close eye on the financial side of running their school. They need to know what their budget is so they can plan for school development and provision of resources. The may need to monitor monies being lodged for swimming, school tours, book rental or fundraising activities.Those who use it have fed back that they are pleased that it is simple in concept and user-friendly. WHAT DOES IT DO? Airgead Bunscoile will track and analyse the school’s bank transactions and you can print a report for your file. If you have a budget or grant for a particular expense, you can set it up to show how much of that budget or grant remains. Most importantly, once you have set up the income and expense headings for your own school, your treasurer or school secretary can do all the data entry.
in the ‘Reserves’ section. You can also print a list of uncashed cheques. These are entered on the ‘Reconciliation’ page where the balance in Airgead Bunscoile and the balance on your bank statement are reconciled.
Even though the treasurer may be taking responsibility for the school accounts, most principals like to keep a close eye on the financial side of running their school. The current version of Airgead Bunscoile is 1.4 which has some improved features e.g. category headings for each month on the printed sheets. For many of the improvements in developing the programme, I thank the principals who made me aware of problems and made suggestions. Feedback is important and always welcome.
As the data is entered, an Income/Expense report is automatically created and this can be printed off on a single sheet. This is useful when you are preparing a report for a Board of Management meeting. It shows the Board which grants and other incomes have been received and the total spent in each area of expenditure. At the end of the school year it is a complete record of the Income and Expenditure for that year. Other reports are also created simultaneously and these can also be printed and filed in hard copy. It is always necessary to keep paper records of your school accounts. Indeed the purpose of Airgead Bunscoile is not to replace your paperbased records but to generate these records as easily and quickly as possible. These printed reports are kept as a record of the financial status of your school account on that date. A monthly Income and Expenditure report can also be printed both as a list and as an analysed spreadsheet. If you want to budget or ‘reserve’ amounts for planned expenses in the future, these are tracked
My hope is that it facilitates the delegation of that task and helps reduce the busy principal’s workload. HOW DO I ACCESS IT? To use Airgead Bunscoile you must first download it from www.ippn.ie – Policies & Plans – Administration and save it to your computer. When you have downloaded it, you should rename the file immediately to something like “[MySchoolName] Accounts 2011-12”. A new copy of the file should be used for each school year, with the filename changed accordingly. As it is an Excel file, so you will need to have Microsoft Office installed on the computer on which it is to be used. It is important to follow the setup instructions before you start using Airgead Bunscoile. These are available within the package itself by selecting and reading the Instructions, Setup and Design View pages from within the Setup area on the main page. For an Excel file like Airgead Bunscoile to function fully, it is necessary to check for Microsoft updates and install any recommended updates or ‘Service Packs’. If you have an older version of Excel you may get an error message that ‘Macros are not enabled’ and the file may not work until you have updated Excel as explained above. WHAT ABOUT BACKUPS? It is strongly recommended that you create a back-up version of the file each month so you can always go back to last month’s copy if there is a problem with the file. To do this, select File – Save As, and append ‘Nov2011’ (or similar) to the filename.
WHAT DOES IT NOT DO? The user can make many changes within the programme, renaming, removing and adding new categories of income or expense. In some cases where users hoped to expand the programme this was not possible. It was not conceived as a tool to calculate PAYE or PRSI returns. It does not track payments made by individual pupils or keep a record of contributions made by individual parents. However, it seems to provide much of the information that a principal and a Board of Management need to have available. It speeds up and simplifies the keeping of school accounts. PAG E 1 8
WHAT DO I DO IF I ENCOUNTER A PROBLEM? Frequently asked questions and answers have been compiled and are available to view/download from www.ippn.ie – Policies & Plans – Administration. These are now included in the Airgead Bunscoile – Detailed Instructions document. If you have read these FAQs and they do not answer your query, contact me by email at seanolaimhin@gmail.com and I will endeavour to help you.