Finance

Confessions of an education CFO: why finance for academic organisations needn’t be a headache

Published

5 months ago

February 9, 2026

Confessions of an education CFO: why finance for academic organisations needn’t be a headache

When you’re running a business of whatever size, it’s critical to know your numbers – but when you’re running the finances for 22 schools, it’s even more imperative to get your maths right.

Established in 2016, Sapientia Education Trust (SET) is responsible for more than 8,500 pupils and 1,300 staff across Norfolk and Suffolk. However, until 2022, the administration of its finances was still being done the old school way – manually – with piles of paper-based files and spreadsheets.

Steven Dewing, SET’s chief financial officer, says: “When I joined in September 2021, the team were struggling. The trust was recovering after Covid, and getting invoices paid on time and reports delivered on time was a challenge.”

The system being used by the trust was adopted back when it encompassed just five schools. By the time Dewing joined, the number of schools had risen to 15 – each with its own database and no sharing of data. “There were lots of silos.”

Dewing recalls how his deputy needed a whole day each month simply to reconcile it all, with numbers pulled out and manually put on to consolidated spreadsheets. Only then could data be manipulated into the right formats needed.

“That was not uncommon for finance departments,” he says, “but it is very prone to error. Also, invoices were being manually signed, requisitions were written by hand, and because we had a different system for each school, we couldn’t join these up. People physically carried around loads of paper, so it was hard to maintain compliance.”

‘Everything in one database’

All this changed in September 2022 when SET moved to a new system, Sage Intacct, which was rolled out with the support of ION, a Sage Education implementation partner.

And for a trust that includes the country’s largest state boarding school with 1,400 children alongside small, rural primary schools with as few as 16 pupils, the finance platform was a gamechanger.

The trust includes the country’s largest state boarding school

“Now we have everything in one database,” says Dewing. “Each school is still its own entity, but it’s all shared so there is no manual reconciling, it all just happens in the system.”

He adds that using Intacct has also meant SET can combine purchasing across the trust, allowing it to benefit from economies of scale and supplier discounts, while reducing the admin of having to purchase across all its schools.

He also highlights the platform’s ease of use and describes how having access to personalised dashboards for every user has been a massive step forward. “We used to pull out data and then email it to people,” he says, “but now depending on what level you are and what your role is, there are different dashboards. Users can go in and see information whenever they want and drill down to the transaction. It has enabled us to empower them with data they need, when they need it.”

Successful use cases for this part of the implementation include head teachers in SET’s small rural schools seeing an accurate and real-time position of their finances, with staff able to login from any location any time to study the data and reports.

“What’s good is we can pull in non-financial information too, like pupil numbers and staff numbers,” adds Dewing. “You can then combine that with other data to give cost per student, cost per staff member, and much more, without any Excel manipulation.”

Adding up the time saved with AI

Within SET’s finance department, a pool of four people is responsible for multiple schools reporting to Dewing. Below this there are others who input transactions, invoices and payments.

To ensure the department was up to speed from day one, ION provided training in Sage Intacct during the onboarding process. It offered Dewing and his colleagues a structured programme, which the CFO says was a major help given “it’s a really big bit of software with lots of different functionality”.

AI tools have proved to be an invaluable timesaver for processing invoices

“Having someone guide you through it and teach you what it does, while making sure you’re doing the right things at the right time, was vital,” he says. “We broke the training down into four two-hour sessions rather than one whole day and also got them to record some short videos, which we continue to use.”

Dewing has found a number of Sage Intacct’s AI-driven tools particularly useful. For instance, Outlier Detection, which automatically spots data appearing in odd patterns and suggests corrections, and Accounts Payable Automation, which uses AI to populate invoices against purchase orders.

Given that SET processes more than 25,000 invoices a year, this represents a transformational timesaver for colleagues who no longer have to input the details themselves and simply now check over the AI-prepared documents.

Dewing cites this as just one key example of how the move to Sage Intacct has revolutionised what his finance team can do for the wider trust.

“It has enabled finance to move from a pure admin function, where you carry bits of paper around and get things paid, to a strategic partner in the organisation,” he says. It’s become less about ‘have we paid this on time or have we ordered that’, because that just happens through the system.

“We can now spend far more time supporting people to take financial decisions and in budgeting. Sage Intacct has changed our relationships with the schools because they see what value we bring.”

Find out more about Sage Intacct and book a demo, at: sage.com

Finance

Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approves audit contract, new finance director position

Published

8 hours ago

July 7, 2026

Press Room

Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approves audit contract, new finance director position

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – The Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approved a one-year audit contract capped at $131,750 plus $225 per hour during a virtual meeting Monday, along with a new finance director job description.

The contract is with Mauldin & Jenkins Certified Public Accountants, an Atlanta-based firm, and covers the 2025-26 fiscal year and the restatement of the 2024-25 fiscal year and ancillary services through FY 2029-2030. The work is set to be completed by Nov. 15.

The board approved the contract in a 5-0 vote.

Audit contract details

Interim Chief Financial Officer Kyna Koch said the cost is already accounted for in the district’s budget.

“And is actually less than we expected given our current situation — we were thrilled with the bid,” Koch said.

Koch said she believes this is Mauldin & Jenkins’ first school district audit in Kentucky, but that the firm works with school districts of more than 100,000 students throughout the Southeast.

“Quite frankly when I spoke to the folks at KDE they were thrilled because we’re running kind of short of auditors who want to do school district audits — so all around I think this was a win-win for everyone,” Koch said.

New finance director position

The board also approved a new job description for the position of Director of Finance. Acting Superintendent Dr. Bill Bradford said the title will replace two associate director positions.

“Which will not only save the school district money but it’s also going to streamline our work and align internal controls to make room for a more efficient unit,” Bradford said.

Koch said the position will be posted as soon as possible following the board’s approval.

Closed session

The board went into closed session for more than an hour to discuss pending investigations that could lead to employee discipline. When the board returned, it took no action and adjourned the meeting.

Finance

UK Watchdog Urged to Consider Broader Oversight of AI Financial Firms | PYMNTS.com

Published

18 hours ago

July 6, 2026

Press Room

UK Watchdog Urged to Consider Broader Oversight of AI Financial Firms | PYMNTS.com

The UK’s financial regulator should consider expanding its oversight to cover advanced artificial intelligence models used in financial services, according to a review commissioned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), as policymakers assess whether existing rules can keep pace with rapidly evolving AI technology.

According to Bloomberg, the review recommends that the FCA evaluate whether large language models developed by companies including OpenAI and Anthropic should fall within the regulator’s remit if they play an increasingly significant role in consumer financial services. The report was led by Sheldon Mills, an executive director at the FCA, and was published on Monday.

The review concludes that the UK’s current activity-based regulatory framework does not require a wholesale overhaul. However, it warns that continued advances in AI capabilities and wider adoption of AI-powered financial products could expose gaps in existing oversight if technology providers increasingly influence regulated financial activities, Bloomberg reported.

Among its recommendations, the report calls for a review of the FCA’s regulatory perimeter and suggests strengthening the regulator’s authority under the UK’s Critical Third Parties regime. Such changes could allow the watchdog to exercise greater oversight of technology providers whose services have become integral to financial markets, including major AI developers and cloud infrastructure companies.

The recommendations reflect growing concern that artificial intelligence is reshaping how financial products are designed, distributed and used. Banks and other financial institutions are increasingly deploying generative AI to support customer service, fraud detection, compliance functions and financial guidance, while consumers are also turning directly to general-purpose AI tools for financial information.

The review also raises broader competition and market structure issues. As financial institutions rely on a relatively small number of AI model developers and cloud computing providers, operational dependencies could become concentrated among a handful of technology companies. That concentration may create systemic risks if disruptions or failures affect widely used platforms, while also potentially shifting market power away from regulated financial institutions toward large technology providers.

Those concerns mirror recommendations made earlier this year by the UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee, which urged the government to designate major AI and cloud providers as Critical Third Parties, arguing that regulators need stronger supervisory tools as digital infrastructure becomes increasingly central to financial stability.

The FCA launched the Mills Review in January to examine how artificial intelligence could transform retail financial services by the end of the decade. The consultation considered AI’s impact on competition, consumer behavior, market structure and the regulatory framework, with the aim of identifying whether financial regulation should evolve alongside technological change.

According to Bloomberg, the FCA will now consider the report’s recommendations, including whether its regulatory responsibilities should be expanded to reflect the growing influence of general-purpose AI systems in financial services. Any changes to the regulator’s statutory powers would require action by the UK government and would form part of broader efforts to balance innovation, consumer protection, financial stability and effective competition as AI adoption accelerates.

Source: Bloomberg

Finance

MAS moves to rein in autonomous AI agents in finance

Published

1 day ago

July 6, 2026

Press Room

MAS moves to rein in autonomous AI agents in finance

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the city state’s central bank and financial regulator, has joined forces with major financial institutions and FinTechs to release a white paper aimed at keeping AI agents in finance operating within safe limits.

The paper, called Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR), lays out an industry-built framework designed to let AI agents perform financial tasks in a manner that is safe, secure and dependable. It has been produced under BuildFin.ai, the MAS programme that backs the responsible creation and rollout of AI tools across the financial sector.

The push comes as AI agents take on more autonomous work at a pace that makes hands-on human oversight impractical. In response, firms require real-time controls that keep agent behaviour inside the mandates, policies and risk limits they have defined. SAFR answers this with a series of governance checkpoints that check and log each action an agent proposes before that task is carried out.

The framework extends the AI Risk Management toolkit created through MAS’ Project Mindforge, concentrating on how protections can be put into practice at the moment an agent acts. The white paper maps out how measures such as policy bound execution, real time validation, auditability and interoperability can be woven into system operations, giving institutions the confidence to deploy agents consistently.

Industry participants have already tested SAFR in several settings. These include agent-assisted payments and treasury work, where agents handle routine transactions inside set mandates to cut friction and lift efficiency; wealth management and advisory processes, where agents examine documents and produce structured assessments within tightly defined task limits to speed up compliance reviews; and client engagement, where agents create insights and draft materials within approved content boundaries so staff can serve clients more productively.

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