Deciphering Your School District’s Budget

By the Staff | The Save Jersey Blog

Armed with your proposed budget, your most recent Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) and your most recent Financial Report Update, you are ready to ask the Business Administrator and School Board pinpoint questions.

Be forwarned: it seems intentionally confusing.

The problem arises from having to prepare and finalize a budget for the next fiscal year without the benefit of the final actual numbers. 

You see, budget time is in March and you won’t see what you actually spent on this years items until sometime in September. This is where the CAFR (here’s the one from Trenton) and the Financial Report Updates are required. The CAFR goes back to the two previous years budgets:

trenton school budget

In 2015, the CAFR makes 2012-13 and 2013-14 complete budgets available to you.  It will give you the proposed budget, any additions or subtractions, the revised budget, the money actually spent and the final + or –actual left over. It does this for every line item.

Now you see the problem. 

Since we don’t have our 2014-15 CAFR yet, we can’t compare the numbers and add or subtract money from those line items in the budget that were over funded or underfunded. That’s where the Financial Report Updates come in.. These should be presented monthly to the School Board.  They usually lag behind by about two months.  You may have to OPRA these reports. If you can get these reports going all the way back to the beginning of 2012-13, you can now compare the progress of spending throughout the years for each line item. 

You will see where you were over budgeted and under-budgeted. 

But most importantly, you will be able to reasonably track your progress in the current year as it relates to where you were in 2012-13 and 2013-14 at this time of year. Based on those figures, you should be able to extrapolate forward to a tighter actual for the current year.  And, with a tighter actual for your current year, you should be able to budget a tighter number for next year.

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