An expenditure is money the school itself spends: chalk and paper, a generator repair, a bus fuel bill, the internet subscription, a security guard’s monthly pay. It is the other half of your budget, and the half that is usually missing from a school’s records until the end of the year.

The Expenditures screen exists to make that half as traceable as the income side. Every outgoing payment gets a category, a written reason, an amount, the date the money actually left, and — wherever you have one — the receipt attached to the row. With that in place, “what happened to the fees?” has a real answer.

Two habits keep it honest. Set your categories once, before you need them, and write each reason as if an auditor will read it a year from now. Both take five minutes and both are what turn a list of numbers into evidence.

Code, label, and how many categories you need

The Code is the short handle your accounts speak — SUP, TRN, UTL — and the Label is what a reader sees, written in both languages if the school needs it. Set both once; they then travel with every row that uses the category.

A category is a habit, not a rulebook, so keep the list short enough that people actually use it. Four to eight categories cover most schools — supplies, transport, maintenance, utilities, food, printing, salaries of casual staff, everything else — and a category nobody uses is worse than no category at all. When last year’s category stops being used, switch its Active flag off rather than deleting it: past expenditure keeps the category it was recorded with, so old reports still read correctly and nobody reuses it by accident. Each category row shows how many expenditures carry it, so sorting by amount at the end of term reveals the three categories that dominate your spending — usually the fastest saving your school will find.

Write the reason as an auditor would read it

“Fuel for the school bus, March” is a reason. “Expenditure” is not. The Reason field is printed on nothing and seen by nobody except whoever reads the report — which is exactly why it has to carry the whole truth.

The date, the receipt and the correction

Date Spent defaults to today, which is right nine times out of ten; for a bill you are entering on Monday for the previous month, change it, because a month-end comparison is worthless if every late entry lands in the current period. Attach the invoice or the receipt photo with Upload receipts — the Receipts column then shows how many files are attached and anyone reviewing the month can reopen them, so an expenditure without a receipt stays an assertion while one with it is a fact. And a row entered with the wrong amount or the wrong category is corrected by opening the pencil icon and saving the right values, with the change visible in the screen’s own history: deleting the row would remove the only trace that the school spent that money at all.

Fees in, expenditures out

The two screens are kept apart on purpose. Payments tell you what families owe you and have paid; expenditures tell you what you spent. Both are needed to know whether the year worked — but they answer different questions, and only one of them is money you were actually given.

The Source column, and the month-end comparison

Rows you entered yourself are marked Manual; rows created automatically by the platform — for instance when a subscription is charged — are marked Subscription. It is a small column that answers “did I enter this, or did the system?” without a phone call. Then compare total fee receipts against total expenditures for the month: a month can show strong collections and heavy spending at the same time, and seeing both in the same place is the only way to notice early. Staff salaries are not entered here — they belong to payroll, which calculates them from verified hours and contracts, and entering them again would count the same money twice.