Categories:
Maintained Schools Heads, Business Managers, Administrators

Guidance for finance year end

Guidance for finance year end 

Please read this important information 

Schools must complete closedown tasks as early as possible.

This update includes information about revenue/capital balances, banking/income and purchasing. 

Financial balances 

Key actions and deadlines

  • 31 March: Capital return due. Review pre-populated figures and report any discrepancies
  • 24 April: Lease return due. Declare lease details or confirm nothing to declare
  • 31 March: Local expenditure accounts. Reconcile and make sure they are topped up before the end of the financial year 
  • 30 September: Voluntary funds - if your school manages external funds you must submit audited accounts

Other dates:

  • 13 March: Complete all capital account transactions
  • 20 March: Process internal trading requests
  • 31 March: Final date to enter invoices for 2025/26 spending

For full details check the information on the schools’ intranet.

Banking/income

  • 20 March: Last day to record petty cash transactions in the IBC

All petty cash transactions paid from your local expenditure (imprest) account must be recorded on the IBC. This allows enough time for the approving officer to review and approve the claim before 31 March.

  • 31 March: Last day to bank cash and cheques.

All income relating to the 2025-26 financial year must be banked by this date.

Complete record local banking in the IBC, to post the income to your cost centre on the same day the income is banked. This is an important fraud control and means your income is posted in the correct financial year.

Note: under exceptional circumstances record local banking in the IBC can be completed up to Tuesday 7 April 2026.  The posting date must be recorded as 31 March 2026.

Purchasing 

Make sure you’re on top of your purchasing actions in the run up to 31 March by meeting these deadlines. 

27 March: 

  • Approve invoices for service shop purchase orders 
  • Review all open orders (including service orders) before the end of the financial year.  If you need to close a purchase order this should be done using PO master in the IBC
  • Where service orders (service shop) are used up (that means all invoices have been received) close down the order
  • Where service orders are mostly used up, you can increase the value of the purchase order to keep using the same order for the same supplier in the new financial year
  • Confirm price blocked invoices in the IBC can be paid.

If you have an open service order and are still expecting services to be delivered and invoices issued in the next financial year you don’t have to close this down.

Guidance about closing purchasing can be found on the IBC help pages by searching for ‘purchasing’.