It’s time for the annual visit from your friendly Audit Excellence team. We aim to undertake the audit of your school with minimal disruption to your team however we do require special assistance on the audit visit day and in resolving any queries promptly.

When the Auditors visit your school, part of their job is to verify there are adequate systems in place, ensuring the safeguarding of school resources. A very important part of this is ensuring appropriate controls exist over your payments. An effective payments system should generally include:

The IRD has issued a draft public ruling XPB0035: Payments Made by Parents or Guardians of Students to State Schools – GST Treatment. The ruling confirms the current treatment whereby payments to a school for the purpose of the general fund are not compensation for education, so GST is payable.

At this time of year schools should be finalising their annual budgets if these are not already set and in place. Good budgets will have a clear record of the assumptions behind them. This makes it easy to identify fundamental changes in these assumptions requiring subsequent revision of the budget.

The 2007 year required a large number of changes to your annual financial statements, but we’re pleased to report that for the 2008 year end very little change is required by the Ministry of Education.