It started with a simple request — “Can you send me the P&L?”
What should have taken minutes turned into days of frustration, spreadsheets, and guesswork. In a school with world-class facilities, healthy enrolments, and millions in reserves, no one expected the financial reporting to be the weakest link. But behind the polished presentation of a thriving independent school lay a hidden tangle of misaligned systems, outdated processes, and data you couldn’t quite trust.
This is the story of how those cracks were discovered — and why every school should take a closer look at its own numbers before the questions start coming.
A Change in the Office
It began, as these things often do, with a change of faces in the finance office.
A new Finance Manager arrived at a large, well-resourced independent school — multiple campuses, boarding and international students, thousands of enrolments, and hundreds of staff. On the surface, everything looked strong. The buildings gleamed, the programs were thriving, and the bank accounts were healthy. The school had enviable surpluses and large reserves.
But within weeks, something felt off. The numbers didn’t make sense. Reports couldn’t be trusted. Questions from the Finance Committee went unanswered, not because people were hiding anything — but because no one could find the answers.
The First Signs of Trouble
When asked for a basic Profit & Loss statement or a Balance Sheet, the finance team hesitated. They couldn’t run them directly from their school management system, Synergetic, without days of manual work in Excel. Even the Business Activity Statement took far too long, patched together with fixes to make the data “work” for submission.
There was no single version of the truth. Reports from different sources didn’t match. Historical records were patchy or missing. Bank reconciliations didn’t balance in the system, so a separate spreadsheet had to be maintained. And perhaps most worrying of all — the Finance Manager didn’t trust the numbers enough to make decisions.
A Wealthy School in a Risky Position
This wasn’t a struggling school. Far from it. With healthy enrolments and a strong financial position, there was no danger of doors closing. For years, this stability had masked deep flaws in the way financial information was recorded, reported, and understood.
Worryingly, the auditors had never raised concerns. The processes and supporting papers were so complicated that the information was simply taken at face value. For the new Finance Manager, however, the situation was both unacceptable and overwhelming — prompting a call to Precision for help. Beneath the surface lay a web of outdated configurations, manual fixes, and fragmented data that could no longer stand up to the scrutiny of governance.
Peeling Back the Layers
Once Precision started digging, the issues came thick and fast.
The General Ledger — the backbone of financial reporting — was misaligned. Profit & Loss accounts were set up as balance sheet accounts and vice versa. Codes for the school were mixed up with codes for 13 other related entities, making it impossible to produce accurate reports for one without dragging in the other.
Budgets weren’t fully loaded into the system, and for many expenses, not even phased over the months of the full year. Cost centres were tied to individual staff instead of positions, so historical tracking fell apart whenever people changed roles. GST control accounts had incorrect settings, and GL codes were missing or with wrong defaults.
Processes That Worked — Until They Didn’t
If the system setup was flawed, the day-to-day processes made things worse.
Bank transactions were imported in bulk, obscuring the detail needed for proper reconciliation. Journal entries were netted off to “save time” — but at the cost of transparency. Some income and expenses bypassed the Profit & Loss entirely, living only in balance sheet accounts. Adjustments from audits were never fed back into the system, so the trial balance didn’t match the published financial statements. The balance sheet was only reconciled at year end, board papers were below standard, and budget holders had never received a report.
The finance team worked hard. But their effort went into patching and reworking reports in spreadsheets, rather than producing reliable, timely information directly from the system.
The Moment of Realisation
It all came to a head when the Finance Manager began asking harder questions.
Why did certain figures look different in different reports? Why weren’t results compared to budget? Where was the balance sheet? What trends could be seen over time?
The answers didn’t come quickly — not because the team didn’t care, but because the data simply wasn’t set up to produce them. The deeper they looked, the more they realised the system couldn’t tell the school’s financial story without significant manual intervention in Excel and Word documents.
Why This Story Matters
For readers in other schools, this tale may feel uncomfortably familiar.
Maybe your financial reporting relies on “that one spreadsheet” only a single staff member understands. Maybe your systems haven’t been reviewed in years. Maybe your budgets don’t quite match your reports until someone spends a day “fixing” them at month’s end.
These aren’t just operational headaches — they’re risks. Over time, outdated structures, inconsistent coding, and manual processes can leave a school vulnerable. You may have cash in the bank, but without accurate, timely, and trusted reporting, the ability to plan, forecast, and govern effectively is compromised.
The Takeaway
This school’s experience is a reminder that even the most robust institutions can harbour hidden weaknesses in their financial management. Strong reserves can mask problems for years, but when governance starts asking sharper questions, those weaknesses become impossible to ignore
So, ask yourself:
Can we run accurate, reconciled reports at the push of a button?
Does our system reflect the way we actually operate?
Are our processes building confidence in the numbers — or just patching them together?
In the end, this story is less about one school’s crisis and more about a universal truth in accounting: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Don’t be worried — this school and its Finance Manager did get a happy ending. Within weeks of hard work, Synergetic was humming, financial operations were transformed, and reporting became transparent. The auditors? They were replaced.
At Precision, we’ve seen these stories play out in many forms.
Each school’s challenges are unique, but the underlying themes are often the same — systems not matching the reporting needs, processes that no longer serve their purpose, and teams working harder than they need to. By spotting the signs early and asking the right questions, schools can move from uncertainty to clarity. And when the numbers tell the right story, leadership can focus on what really matters: delivering the best outcomes for students.