Industry

Expense management for school boards

A board's central budget and a school's fundraising money are audited separately, under different rules. Smartbills codes each expense to its fund, so both close from the same receipts.

A teacher sitting with pupils in a classroom

Principals, office staff and teachers record each expense when they buy, with the fund named and the receipt attached, and get reimbursed without asking twice.

Board funds and school funds stay separate

The person spending names the fund at the purchase. The separation your auditors rely on is recorded on the transaction itself, and nobody spends July sorting it out.

Board, school-generated and parent council funds kept apart at capture
Per-school activity accounts current at any point in the year
Receipts already attached for the school-generated funds audit

Teachers get reimbursed without a paper claim

Classroom supplies bought out of pocket are the sector's most common expense and the worst handled. A teacher submits a photo in the mobile app, allowances are checked automatically, and the payment goes out on schedule.

Submit by photo or upload, with no expense report to assemble
Classroom and supply allowances checked at submission
Principal approval routed by school and by threshold

Spending records ready for an access request

Public bodies get asked for their records, sometimes years later. The request, approval, receipt and payment stay linked. Producing every transaction for a vendor or a period is a report you run.

Why teams switch

School spending is still reconciled from envelopes of receipts.

Teachers pay for classroom supplies themselves, then wait weeks on a paper claim.

A claim is a photo taken in the app, and the money goes out on the next payment run.

School-generated funds get reconciled once a year from an envelope of receipts.

Activity funds are coded at the transaction. Every school's account is current all year and nobody rebuilds it each summer.

Field trips and athletics get paid in cash and on cards nobody can trace.

Cards are issued for a specific purpose with the trip as the budget, and at stores that send receipts through Smartbills the receipt is attached to the transaction automatically.

Trustee expense disclosure gets assembled by hand before every publication.

Disclosure is a report run over itemized, coded records, with nothing rebuilt from statements and paper.

The products that do the work.

Each product works on its own, and when you run two, the same record carries from the receipt to the ledger entry.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What people ask us before they sign up.

No. PowerSchool, Aspen and similar systems keep doing their job. Smartbills handles spending, receipt capture and reimbursement, then posts coded entries to your financial system.

As separate funds with their own approvers and their own reporting, because that's how they're audited. The rules differ by province and state. The fund structure is configured to match yours.

Only if they spend their own money. Submitting a receipt takes no training, since a photo in the mobile app is enough.

Yes. Cards can be issued against a budget, a trip, a program or a school, with policy applied at the purchase and not reviewed afterwards.

Card and electronic spending is where Smartbills does the most, and cash still needs a process on your side. What changes is that everything else stops competing with it for the same staff time.

Through your usual procurement process, normally starting with a handful of schools. Measuring the share of purchases that ended with a coded receipt attached makes a quicker case than a feature comparison.

Get started

Start with three schools and one term