The school year is almost completed. Many schools are preparing for graduation and a short summer break before starting a new school year. For many, this means time to rest their minds and bodies. But school financial planning never really offers the chance for a break. Many K-12 schools and districts need to plan their finances years in advance. They do this through strategic financial planning. There are many school strategic plan examples available, but if you are looking at the viability and sustainability of your school, here are five things you must have for strategic financial planning for K-12 boards.
Are you looking for answers on strategic financial planning for K-12 boards? Simply want to make financial planning easier? Since 1998, Questica has worked to make handling finances easier and better for K-12 schools and districts. We manage over $63 billion in annual public sector and non-profit budgets, and we want to help you. Please visit our website for more information and consider signing up for one of our free webinars.
Five must-haves for strategic financial planning for K-12 boards
A solid mission statement
Like with any organization, schools need a mission statement; a formal summary of the aims and values of the school. Establishing a mission statement is essential for uniting the goals and objectives of administration, teaching staff, parents and students.
Long-range vision
With the mission statement comes a long-range vision. Ask yourself, how will your school achieve its mandate within the next five years? Where do you want your school to be in exactly five or ten years’ time?
Short-term goals
Because a long-range vision can sometimes be overwhelming to solve, its often effective to break it down into short-term goals. Achieving each goal helps move you further along to fulfill your long-range vision. Short-term goals are also effective for keeping your school employees positive and productive — each goal achieved can contribute to employee engagement and satisfaction.
Resources
Once you understand your goals both long and short-term, you need to map out what resources are available to the school. This not only means what you have now, but also where where the funding will come from in the future. You might be receiving government funds but consider also how much your school will receive in tuition and fundraising, and whether that money comes with stipulations, such as using it for building improvements or a specific program only.
Alternative options
You have your plan, and you’ve begun to tally and allocate your resources. But things often don’t go exactly to plan. That’s why strategic planning often requires “what-if” scenarios. Budgeting and forecasting software allows you to make quick adjustments when information about dollars and people impact your school’s budget. Think of these as backup plans in case the worse (or even the best!) should happen.
Questica software is technology that helps your K-12 school
Questica budgeting software is a helpful financial solution for K-12 technological integration. With Questica, you can easily align your multiple goals and projections. You can easily map out your strategic financial plan, as well as organize your school’s financial resources. We also allow you the ability to easily create and organize multiple “what-if” scenarios at once, with better efficiency than Excel spreadsheets. The software is intuitive and easy to use because we integrate with your existing financial and student information systems.
In addition to that, Questica offers a resource called Questica Help. This resource currently houses over 900 searchable videos, articles, job aids, quick reference guides, and FAQs that cover a wide variety of other topics such as analytics and reporting, dashboards, budget tools, allocations, preparing next year’s budget, transparency tools like our OpenBook, plus user settings, administration and much more. No need to lengthy, confusing teaching seminars. Your school’s staff will be awestruck by how quickly they learn our software.
To learn more about Questica and how our software can help you, read a or take a product tour.
