Finance
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.
“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”.
“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
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
Finance
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.
Copyright 2026 WKYT. All rights reserved.
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.
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