Town Council Approves Funds for School District Accounting Software

The Avon Town Council unanimously approved a supplemental appropriation Thursday night of $224,475 to the Board of Education. The appropriation will go toward new financial software to better assist the accounting department.

The Board of Finance must also approve the proposal before the funds can be used to purchase the software.

The new software will replace a current system that requires an abundance of manual labor, said Avon’s Superintendent of Schools Gary Mala.

“When I began my tenure as the superintendent in the spring, it was clear there were concerns about this software,” Mala said. “It wasn’t meeting the needs of the school district.”

The current software, Great Plains, requires manual entries into spread sheets and does not have the ability to roll over the budget from each fiscal year, Mala said.

“We have about 523 employees, and that’s a significant workforce to have to prepare the payroll manually,” he said.

The new system, Budget Sense, would allow a much more streamlined approach to accounting and human resources than is possible under Great Plains, a Microsoft program.

The Board of Education brought this proposal to the council in August, so that if approved, Budget Sense could be installed and operational in the coming school year.

“That is the plan,” said the Avon’s school district’s business manager, Gary Franzi, on whether the software would be ready in time.

The council hesitated on the proposal's approval. There was a discrepancy between the council and the Board of Education on whether or not funds would be withdrawn from a part of the Board of Education’s budget set aside for Special Education and Tuition.

“I object to taking money that was set aside for Special Education and spending it on software,” said Councilwoman Pamela Samul. “The public had a budget presented to them and they were told they would need X amount of dollars for Special Education and that is what they approved.”

Franzi said the accounting was complicated.

“It would be applied to Special Education expenditures in the current operating budget, thereby reducing those expenditures that are currently in the operating budget at those levels,” Franzi said. “The result of that would add capacity to our bottom line.”

Normally, Franzi said, this would come as a capital request rather than a special appropriation, however that would require waiting an entire year.

The Board of Education wanted a new system for the beginning of the school year.

“I’m trying to manage a $48 million budget with a manually intensive system,” Mala said. “Most of the work is being done manually and not using the software itself.”