Sachin Sharma, founder of Precare Desk, explains why charter schools overspend despite hours of spreadsheet budgeting. Teachers buy supplies from multiple sources, receipts scatter across personal cards, and budgets never connect to actual purchases. He outlines three fixes: tie budgets directly to purchasing so spenders see real-time limits, give all stakeholders centralized budget visibility, and consolidate all expenses into one system that auto-updates the budget.
Chapters
I was recently chatting with a business manager of a charter school and she said something that made me cringe. She said, I spend more time updating spreadsheets than actually managing budgets. Right. Their teachers are purchasing supplies from all over the place, Amazon, personal credit cards, you name it. And she has to spend a lot of time chasing those receipts, putting together a budget and so on. And guess what? Even after doing all that, they can't stay under budget because they always go over budget. And then they have those awkward conversations with the teachers or principals and so on. If you're nodding along and you're facing the same challenge, this video is for you where I'm going to break down three simple steps or strategies you must implement to make sure that your budgets are under control and you're not spending weekends, nights just updating your spreadsheets for budgets. So. So let's jump right in. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of Precare Desk, where we help charter schools control spending through better budget visibility. So step one is to set up a proactive budget controls the number one reason. So your budgets are in a spreadsheet, teachers don't know what their budgets are. And then you have to spend time reconciling those budgets and, and then figuring all that out towards the end of the month. A better way is to make sure that your budgets are tied to your purchasing process. So when somebody is actually making a purchase, they can go and check your budget in real time to make sure that they are not going over budget. Now of course, if you're using spreadsheets, it just becomes too hard to do that. So use a purchasing system where the system connects it to the budget. So when somebody goes in and say, all right, I need to purchase supplies, system automatically pulls and say your supplies budget is $200 for the month or whatever the case might be and you have already spent $100, remaining is 100. And you can also put more proactive controls so that they can't go over budget. Right. So that's step number one. Number two is provide real time visibility. So there are many stakeholders are looking at their budget on a regular basis. It might be your board who wants to kind of review the reports. It might be a grants team who is looking for compliance to make sure that if the funds are restricted in use, right. They are only used in certain areas and so on. And you're making sure that you have controls in place for that spend to be routed to the Right. Person to approve before the purchase happened. Right. So this all we counted under the visibility bucket. Now, of course, if you're using spreadsheets, it's not updated this, so you can't provide reports on it. And you might be just burning the mint hot oil, right. Updating the sheet before the board meeting so that you can tell the board where the grants and the usage and so on is. So if you have a purchasing system which has this budget control, it automatically provides that visibility because now you have central place where everybody can go and say, okay, here's my budget. Here's what I spend till date. Here's where that money was spent. So if you want to check for compliance from not just approval standpoint, but from grant standpoint, you could do that, right? So that's number two. Number three is have one system for everything. Right? So what do I mean by that? Many times what you see is like a broken approval process. So even if you have somehow managed, you know, to keep your budgets updated in spreadsheets, you have email process for approval, then they go to Amazon to buy the supplies, then you have to come back and reconcile all that. Right. Or you have credit card spending and so on. What we recommend is whatever system you choose to implement or a process, it should be one step. Like, you know, for example, I should go to Amazon, pick what I want to buy, then it should route it for approval. And even it doesn't matter whether I'm paying the vendor on like a credit through a credit card or through a regular invoice, it's just one process for approval. That way you make sure that your budget always stays updated. Because if, if you have your credit card spending happening outside and it's not tied to the budget, guess what? Your budgets would be out of date, are not updated always. Right. It doesn't matter whether you're using a spreadsheet or a system. So it's very important to have everything in one single place. So if you're struggling with budget visibility and grant compliance and so on, three steps to implement. Just a quick summary, right? Make sure you have proactive budget checks. Centralize the visibility so everybody can look at the same, you know, sheet of paper, right. From a budget visibility and grant compliance standpoint, and then have one system for all your purchases. Now, I hope you like this video. If you're struggling with cost control or budget visibility, drop a comment in the video and I'll get back to you on how you can solve it today. Thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
