In this solo presentation, Sachin Sharma explains that charter schools rely primarily on grant funding rather than traditional revenue streams, which makes spend management fundamentally different. The dominant driver is budget compliance: schools must align expenditures with grant‑specified budgets, and this compliance focus dictates procurement processes. A key challenge is the lack of real‑time visibility into spending, which hampers decision‑making and can lead to inefficient use of grant money, especially late in the fiscal year. Sharma argues that improved spend‑management visibility enables schools to allocate funds more effectively, respond to audit inquiries confidently, and maintain cost‑conscious purchasing because grant budgets are limited. Ultimately, a robust spend‑management process addresses three core needs—budget adherence, spending transparency, and cost control—tailored to the unique nuances of grant‑funded charter schools.
Chapters
Spend management in schools is different in many ways. Here are some of it. So schools, one of the unique things about schools, or any organizations for that matter, is the. They are getting the grants, right, As a source of funding. So there is like no, you know, income per se. So you have grants that are, you know, especially for charter schools, right? You might have specific grants that are coming in. So spend management is. It's taking a very different role there. And the role is more compliance based rather than, okay, we need to have a process. Like the compliance is what's driving the process. Let me say what I didn't get into more details on what I mean by that, because compliance could be many things, but the main thing here is budget compliance. So you have a budget based on the grants you have received and what you want to do is make the effective use of that money, right? And the challenges we see with certain charter schools is they don't have complete visibility into their spending against those budgets. So they're taking decisions like, based on, okay, what they need to spend, knowing what they know at that time. But imagine coming to the 11th month of the year and then you have another 100,000 to spend, right? But if you knew that all the way along in terms of how much you're spending at any given time, you can take better decisions on how to use that grant. So having that visibility solves for using it more effectively. So from a compliance standpoint, you can go if tomorrow you get audited and said, okay, where did you spend this money? How did you spend this money? You're in a better position to answer that. So I think that is a unique nuance in terms of, from a school standpoint, obviously you still need better processes. Doesn't mean you should just buy it from any other vendor. I think a lot of our charter schools are very cost conscious there because of the grants. So they're always looking for the best deals. But having a spend management process there solves for these challenges in terms of budgets, visibility and then obviously cost control.
