Education

This topic is only applicable to Sage 200 Standard for Education.

Sage 200 has been specifically tailored for the education sector to help schools manage their income and expenditure, track budgets and produce reports for stakeholders such as your LEA or the Department for Education.

Setting up

When you first log on, you'll see our Configuration Assistant which is designed to help you through the initial set up of Sage 200. This is shown as a set of panels for each section of Sage 200.

Choosing your school type

On the Company Details panel, you must choose whether you're an Academy or a Maintained school. You also select your school type, Primary, Secondary etc.

Sage 200 uses this to create the elements required for your chart of accounts and to add reports

Sage 200 creates the following:

Sage 200 creates the following:

  • Report Categories - used to represent CFR codes so you can group your accounts on your financial reports.

  • Cost Centres - used to represent your funds.

  • Departments - used to represent your school departments, Maths, English etc

  • CFR balances report

Create your chart of accounts

You can create your accounts in the following ways:

  • Use a chart of accounts provided by us and amend it to suit your needs.

  • Import an existing chart of accounts.
  • Create accounts individually in Sage 200.

You can create your nominal accounts in the following ways:

  • Use a chart of accounts specified by your LEA.

    Where you LEA has provided use with this, you can use a predefined chart of accounts. These include the nominal accounts required by your LEA and additional accounts required by Sage 200.

    To do this:

    1. Select your LEA and your type of school, primary, secondary etc. on the Company details panel.
    2. Choose the option to use the set of nominal accounts provided by us on the Nominal accounts panel.
  • Import an existing chart of accounts.
  • Create accounts individually in Sage 200.

Choosing your defaults

The other panels on the configuration wizard contain defaults that you can set for various parts of Sage 200. If you don't have any special requirements, we recommend that you use the defaults set by us. If you open each panel you can see what these defaults are and choose to accept or change them.

See Set up a Sage 200 company for the first time.

Report categories, CFR codes and SOFA categories

Report categories

Report categories are used in Sage 200 to group your nominal accounts together for reporting purposes. Every nominal account must be linked to a report category. This determines how the transactions posted to each nominal account are reported on financial reports.

If you're maintained school, you income and expenditure needs to be reported using the CFR code prescribed by the Education Funding Agency. In Sage 200 we have created report categories to represent the required CFR codes. This means you can correctly report your income and expenditure for your LEA.

If you're an academy, we have created some report categories to represent how income and expenditure is most commonly reported. Using our 'out of the box' categories makes it easier for you to use our sample reports.

SOFA categories

If you're an academy, these are special additional categories used to report your nominal account balances on the SOFA report. Any nominal account linked to a SOFA category and fund is included on the SOFA report.

To make it easier for you to get started, we have provided a set of SOFA categories for you, based on guidance from SORP 2015. You can also add your own if required.

See Report categories.

Fund management

In Sage 200, you use cost centres to record and report on how you've spent your funds.

A cost centres is an additional code that's appended to your nominal accounts. Each cost centre code represents a fund. You can then create a set of nominal accounts for each fund. This allows you record different types of income and expenditure against the same fund

To help you get started, we have created some cost centres for you to represent the common funds used by most schools, such as the Pupil Premium. You can change these and add your own cost centres as required.

Each time you need to record expenditure against a fund, you simply choose the nominal account for the item being purchased that has the cost centre for the correct fund. For example, if you used the general annual grant to pay for some educational software, you would record this against the Educational Software nominal account with a cost centre for the grant, such as 7200 GAG.

Any nominal accounts with a cost centre and SOFA category are also included on the SOFA report, which shows the overall income and expenditure of your funds.

See Cost centres.

Departments

You can use departments to report on your income and expenditure by school department or year group. A set of department codes is created for your based on your school type. For Middle, Secondary, High and Sixth Form, they based on subjects. For First and Primary, they're based on year groups. You can use these or create your own.

You then append a Dept code to your nominal accounts, so you can report on income and expenditure for all accounts with the same Dept code. For example, if you used a grant to buy some resources for the Maths department, you would record this against the nominal code for resources, the fund and the maths department, such as 7300 GAG MTH.

SOFA report

You can produce the figures required for the Statement of Financial Activities (SOFA) report from Sage 200. As long as you select Academy on the Company Details a SOFA report and sample layout are added to Sage 200.

The SOFA report will include figures from any nominal accounts with cost centre (fund) and SOFA category. All you need to do is to link SOFA categories with your nominal accounts.

To get you started, we have created a sample layout which uses the SOFA categorises we've provided for you. As long as you link your nominal accounts to the correct SOFA category, you can use the sample layout to run the report without further set up.

If you do need to add your own SOFA categories or make other changes to the SOFA report, the sample layout provides an easy way to do this.

See About the SOFA report.

Budgets and departmental oversight

Budgets are set against your nominal accounts so once you've recorded your budget, finance managers or head teachers can track the actual and committed spend against budget. All budgets can be set for your current year and for up to five years in the future. You can also set up:

  • Combined budgets

    These allow you to group nominal accounts together to report on rolled up totals.

  • Budget owners

    You set these on Combined budgets. If your budget holders also use Sage 200, they can check spend against their budgets only using the Self Service web app. Budget owners can also be set up to authorise any purchase requisitions entered against their budgets.

See How to set up and enter budgets.

Reporting on budgets

  • Budget position for the whole school

    Use an Excel report to see details of your actual and committed values against budget for all nominal accounts. Information is shown across several worksheets to allow you to see the information in several different ways, such as by department or by fund. You can use all the usual Excel functions to customise the report.

  • Budget position for budget holders

    If you set up a Combined budget and set a Budget Owner, that person can see the total actual and committed amount spent for all the nominal accounts that make up their budget in real time. If they're not a regular Sage 200 user, they can use the Self Service web app to see this via a web browser an on any device.

  • Budgets by department

    Print a report that breaks down all your budgets in department sections. Each section has summary showing total and spend and commitment against budget as well as breakdown of all transactions to check what the budget has been spent on. You can email the relevant section direct to your heads of department.

See How to report on your budgets.

VAT126

If you claim VAT refunds using the VAT126 service, you can use Sage 200 to produce the required information with details of the VAT on your purchases. To do this, you produce a report called VAT transactions (Education), which contains the details of your VAT transactions.

The VAT126 service is used to claim back VAT for non-business activities, if you're not registered for VAT and are exempt because you're an academy school or trust. There are certain rules on what you can claim, and this information should be sought from your professional advisor or HMRC.

When you print your VAT reports, the VAT transactions (Education) report includes information required for VAT126, with details of each transaction.

As the VAT126 needs to contain the VAT registration number of the supplier and the details of what you've sold and returned, you need to make sure that you enter these details on your transactions in Sage 200.

See VAT Return and reporting.

Nominal consolidation

If you're a multi academy trust, you can use consolidation in Sage 200 to create reports at trust level, that include the required financial information for all the schools within the trust.

You'll need to add a company on your site to act as the parent reporting company. You can then link this company to all subsidiary schools, and post the trial balance from each school to the parent company.

See Consolidated reporting.

Reporting

As schools have specific reporting requirements, we have created some special reports required by schools to report to their LEA, Governors and so forth.

There are two types of report available:

  • Printed reports.

    These output to the printer, ready to send out. You can use our Report Designer feature to customise the report, if required.

  • Excel reports.

    These are output directly as an Excel spreadsheet. You can use Excel to filter and amend the report as required.

Report Description Type
SOFA

Academies only - Reports on all the values needed for the SOFA report. You can use this report as a base for your Statement of Financial Activities annual report.

Printed
CFR Balances Maintained schools only - This shows your income and expenditure by CFR code. You can use this report as a base for the CFR report you need to send to your LEA. Excel
Nominal Budgets

This report shows you the position of your nominal account budgets for each accounting period, taking into account actual and committed expenditure.

For each nominal account in each period, you can see your account budget, actual expenditure, committed expenditure, and the budget variance.

 Excel
Nominal Outturn

This report shows your budget position for each nominal account taking into consideration any commitments.

For each nominal account, you can see the annual budget, budget to date, actual expenditure, committed expenditure, budget variance, and budget remaining.

Excel

Income and Expenditure

This shows your the balance of income less your expenditure by report category. There are several variations for this report.

 Printed

See Reporting on purchase orders.

Sage is providing this article for organisations to use for general guidance. Sage works hard to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication and strives to keep all supplied information up-to-date and accurate, but makes no representations or warranties of any kind—express or implied—about the ongoing accuracy, reliability, suitability, or completeness of the information provided.

The information contained within this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice. Sage assumes no responsibility for any action taken on the basis of the article. Any reliance you place on the information contained within the article is at your own risk. In using the article, you agree that Sage is not liable for any loss or damage whatsoever, including without limitation, any direct, indirect, consequential or incidental loss or damage, arising out of, or in connection with, the use of this information.