When your district’s finance operation needs support

If your school district is facing an accounting crisis, the Plante & Moran Government Accounting Services Team (GAST) can help with solutions. If your accounting office is temporarily short-staffed, GAST can offer temporary accounting staffing. If your school district needs ongoing financial support services, the team is also prepared to take on a permanent role in your accounting office.

Warning signs that you need GAST: Lack of timely financial information Turnover of key finance personnel Late audits Unreconciled accounting records

Regardless of the situation, we will respond to your specific accounting needs and bring years of experience working with schools to your engagement. You can depend on us to be experts in the generally accepted accounting stands for schools. 

Called in to solve an accounting crisis

The following demonstrates how the government accounting services team helped a school district through a crisis and describes the continuing relationship that evolved.

The school superintendent called us in after his district failed to file its audit report with the state on time. Missing the deadline put the district’s state aid in jeopardy, plus the information in the audit indicated that the district was facing an operating deficit far greater than expected.

It was clear the current accounting model was not working, so the government accounting team set about gathering accurate and timely financial information so that the decision makers of the district, including school board members, the superintendent, and building principals, had the financial information they needed to make decisions. 

Continuing support for the accounting department

Once the district had a better understanding of where it was financially, the Plante & Moran team focused on the day-to-day accounting of the district and began implementing changes to the district’s internal control structure to address the reasons behind the surprise audit findings.
The Plante & Moran team continues to provide accounting outsourcing and financial services to the district by maintaining its accounting records and overseeing the budget preparation, audit preparation, and other external reporting requirements.

This is just one example of how a district has utilized the financial support services of the government accounting team. We have many more examples and each one is different. But all of the schools we serve receive the same dedicated service because putting clients first is the philosophy of Plante & Moran.