Interviews
Time: 40 minutes
Present: Summer Carlisle, accounts payable bookkeeper, and Woody Wiedenhoeft, interim director of business services
The way that I like it to work is if a teacher, let's say a group of teachers has a conference they want to go to – in April they had one at Cardinal Stritch. So, I will get a purchase order for conference registration and they'll attach whatever documentation, you know, we're taking six people, this is the printout that shows how much it's going to be per person, could you cut a check and send it in advance. We'll register for this conference.
So that happens and then if there are hotel bookings, I do like to do it. So, what will normally happen is they'll give me the name of the hotel – a lot of hotels don't take purchase orders, which is understandable – so they will fill out, teachers will fill out, a purchase order and I'll just mail the check to the hotel from that instead of usually you know you have the invoice and then you mail the check, but I just mail it in advance and they bring me the receipt.
As far as mileage goes, you know, if they're going to the conference, I assume they have permission so I don't have to know in advance how many miles you're going to go. They turn in that travel reimbursement sheet.
I guess when they register for the conference their principal or administrator approves…by approving the conference (they approve) that they can drive there. But they also have to, when they turn in their mileage, their principal has to sign off on it. So they see it before it comes to me.
Whatever appropriate administrator it is.
As far as food goes, we require original receipts. I guess if we had someone go out to dinner and spend $150, we would probably…
A lot of teachers ask for itemized receipts for us, which you can get at most places. If somebody spends $7.50 at Panera, I'm OK with that. I know they probably had half a sandwich and a soup. If you're asking me to reimburse you for $50, I need to see that there were four people there. I'm not going to pay, I'm not going to reimburse you for taking you and your kids out to dinner.
And same goes with tolls or gas…I just need to see all those receipts as well. And then they get a check.
In all fairness, I started out as a temporary worker. (April 05) I was hired because the woman who had the position before me resigned and they needed someone to fill in and sort of do menial tasks. As time progressed, I was trained for the position and was eventually hired full time. (Sept. 05)
There was a lot transition between business managers. There was one for 3 years and then he left. Then we had one for a year and she left. And between that time, there wasn't a lot of turnover in the office, but you know, with out a boss…
Plus I know that at some point they redid the office and I know there was some things sort of lost in transition. I don't want to say misplaced, but things were kind of sketchy, hairy, something.
I think when I got here, we were trying to sort of have any semblance of a procedure, because it seemed like things had been done for so long a certain way and then each school had kind of taken on their own idea of the right way to do things, and the woman who had the position before me was here for a lot of years. She knew how everybody and of worked and all the little nuances that they had.
*No uniformity, really.*
Some people turned in their receipts and some people didn't. Some people got approval from the business manager in advance and some people sent in confirming purchase orders saying, 'Oh by the way, we've already ordered this, can you sign off on it?'
So, when I first got here, we had set a deadline for purchase orders and said, you know, this is the last day. Well that deadline in the past had always been sort of loose, and so literally for two more months, we probably got in another 150-180 purchase orders after that deadline. So you know like everything was kind of like, yeah well, we know you said that, but we kind of are just going to do this anyways. We switched over to online purchase orders last fall and sort of cracked down a lot more.
We kind of went through the summer and cleaned things up. We hired a consulting company to come in and fill in as the business mgr and just sort of went through and said this is how we're going to do it and move people towards that. I think that in retrospect it was very good for the district to hire Public Business Consulting (Group). They came in and really just set some standards that probably needed to be set.
I think that those of us that are in the office now – Woody's temporary and I'm leaving soon – I think we'd like to obviously continue down the road that were going. Online purchase orders are working very well. We're looking to implement notification of receipt of items online so everything is done online and purchase orders are entered and they notify me when they've received their items. We're looking to link to all our major vendors through our Skyward system, so instead of writing everything down and typing it in, we can just import items from all the big vendors that we order from. Just a lot more streamlined process. I think people are kind of enjoying that fact that they know what they're supposed to do. So, you know, before I leave, I would like to hear one person say they like online purchase orders. We've had some positive reviews; we've had some frustrated clientele. But, I think just continue to go where we've set a chart to go, and not in transition again, lose what we built.
*Woody talked for a while about his purpose in the district in respect to
PBCG. He noted he works part-time at the Shorewood School District and
part-time at the Racine Unified School District.*
*He said Summer, Karen and Kathy and the accountant, who is now gone, have taken on a lot of the "administrative brunt" they normally wouldn't have, had there been a consistent business manager.*
*He said Summer and the others in the office have a "really good start on
getting the thing (business office) organized"*
*Talked about the potential uses of the Skyward software, the district is
currently utilizing the basic*
*"The district needs and deserves a business manager, and hopefully Summer's
replacement is half as good as her."*
I think for us, as support staff, I think coming into that office, that's our goal. We're not out to make teachers' lives more complicated. We're not out to create bureaucracy and red tape. That might be how it came across initially, but you know, in the long run, this will make their lives a lot easier, and that's the ultimate goal.
Woody: Budgets are very tight now. At one time, budgets weren't as tight (…) There wasn't quite as much concern in this district, as well as a lot of other districts, of having a standardized system. It wasn't that tight – you could figure out a way to make things fit. (…) Now we're simply saying, you know, we ought to make sure there's budget money for it. Plan ahead and that sort of thing, because there truly is not enough money to do what you want to do.
The standardization will be very good, and it will also be good for the budgeting. (…)
*Approval process for reimbursement: teacher, custodian, secretary
*immediate supervisor (principal, usually)
*Summer and Woody both referred back to the reimbursement process and how they will review questionable expensive purchases (ex.: an $80 meal for one person). Summer said they have reviewed a few such purchases recently, sorting the circumstances out with the attendee's supervisor. Woody spoke a bit about per diem rates, for meals mainly, and how other school districts reimburse.*
Woody: It's always the policing action, too. If you're going to have a rule you have to understand you have to have the capability to police it, otherwise it's an invalid rule or just encourages more rule-breaking, and why have a rule if it's supposed to get broken?
With some rules the policing is impossible.
Right now, the policing action is the supervisor with the employee, and when a principal puts their name on that, it means, 'I approve this. I believe this is not only honest but also reasonable and prudent.'
I've been really adamant about enforcing that, because when I first got here, there would be no signature at all, and the principal would say, 'Oh yeah, I saw that,' and so now, people get really frustrated, because I'll send it back four times and say, 'If you want me to pay this, you have to sign it. It's your responsibility. It's your budget. You've taken control of this budget.' And they're getting a little better about it. They maybe don't look as closely as I would like, but at least they sign it and take responsibility for it.
*Discussed the budgets Kim Grady provided us with and how to interpret the numbers for each of the last few years. Some of the numbers may be inaccurate, because the budget was printed before the final audit was complete. Woody said we would be able to take a look at the audits if we like.*
*$16,077: Summer ran a report on 342 account, not including the 27 fund for special education (some of which is reimbursed by the state), grant money*
Woody: A lot of the travel accounts today are not locally-funded by taxes.
*Both talked about grant writing. Summer didn't include grant numbers because it wasn't "what we're paying for." She took out anything with a project code – certain grants have certain codes at the end.*
* *
*Woody spoke about using specialized grants to achieve district-wide goals set each year (i.e. reading, math, etc.)*
Woody: I think there is probably also a trend statewide in most school districts, and that is that more and more of the travel is coming out of grants and less and less is coming out of local funds due to tight budgets. There's more and more grant writing going on.
*Goal of Shorewood School District to write grants, although they are labor-intensive.*
* *
*$15,000: Summer pulled out dues. 940 account pays for the superintendent to be a member of various professional organizations and associations. Teachers are also members of various organizations. Accounts also pay for workshops and conferences. If grants were used to pay for things in the 940, she took them out.*
* *
*Sometimes a district employee may pay for conference attendance out of the travel account and a departmental budget, although that shouldn't happen. Money should be moved to the travel account to accommodate more travel.*
Woody: Because of the staging that we're going through, and trying to have this district get a little more sophisticated, not only in the area of purchasing but also in the area of budgeting, we're also going through a stage of having people understand budgets, how to implement them and how to stay on top of them. And that's a real normal sequence of events when a district hasn't asked each one of their administrators to be budget leaders
or budget administrators. This district…it seemed to have a very centralized budget implementation notion. There were building budgets, but the principal didn't really oversee the building budget. It was kind of watched by the business manager. The business manager kind of watched everything. (…) This district is going through the throes of that change. (…)
I think in the long run that would be one of our goals, where we'd like to see district goal…you need to budget for it. (…)
Woody: You want people to plan ahead and very reasonably…So you also have to put into the system something that, first of all, gets people to plan as accurately as possible and hold their feet to that fire, but then whoever's holding the feet to the fire on that also has to understand that…something breaks down… (…)
*Who's paying for this travel? Is it local money, is it state money, is it federal money? Is it a combination of all of them?*
Woody: All of the above and even some foundation money.
*Primarily one or the other?*
It depends on the year. A big chunk of travel this year will be paid for out of that (Training for Teachers) grant because that grant is designed just to spend people places and teach them things.
*The $16,077 is local money.*