It is the first Monday of the month and the group director, Farida, has three emails open. The flagship campus says it collected a little over ninety per cent of fees due. The riverside campus says eighty-seven. The newest campus says ninety-five, which would make it the best performer in the group, except that nobody quite believes it. Farida spends the morning on the phone and learns that the newest campus counts payments promised by the end of the week as collected, the riverside campus excludes transport fees, and the flagship includes advance payments for next term.
None of the three accountants made a mistake. Each one answered the question as they understood it. The group simply never agreed what the question was. This post is about fixing that: getting every campus to produce figures that mean the same thing, so the monthly numbers can be read instead of argued over.
Why campus numbers drift apart
Numbers drift for ordinary reasons. Each campus was set up by different people at a different time. A bursar who joined from another school brought that school's habits. A principal who wanted to look good in one awkward month changed how late arrivals were counted, and the change stuck. Over a few years, every campus develops a private dialect.
The common sources of drift are predictable:
- Timing. Is a payment counted on the day the family pays, the day the bank clears it, or the day the office records it?
- Scope. Does "fees" include transport, meals, uniform and trips, or tuition only?
- Status. Is a student who has given notice but not yet left still enrolled? Is a student on an approved long absence counted as absent every day?
- Categories. Is late present, absent, or something else? Is a half-day leave an absence?
- Adjustments. Are concessions shown as reduced fees due, or as a deduction after the full amount?
Each of these choices is defensible. The trouble only starts when different campuses make different choices and their figures are then placed side by side.
Write a group data dictionary
The fix starts on paper, not in software. Write a short document, two or three pages, that defines every figure the group reports. Call it a data dictionary, a reporting handbook or simply "what our numbers mean". The name does not matter; the precision does.
For each measure, record four things:
| Item | Example for "fees collected" |
|---|---|
| Definition | Money received and recorded against fees due in the period |
| Includes | Tuition, transport, meals and activity fees |
| Excludes | Advance payments for future terms, refundable deposits, promises to pay |
| Counted when | On the date the payment is recorded by the campus office |
Start with the measures the owner and board actually look at: enrolment, fees due, fees collected, arrears by age, student attendance, staff attendance and headcount. Resist the urge to define fifty things in the first draft. Ten clear definitions beat fifty vague ones.
Agree the dictionary with the people who produce the numbers, not only the people who read them. A campus accountant who helped write the definition of "collected" will apply it; one who received it in an email may not.
Record it the same way, in the same place
Definitions on paper are necessary but not enough. If each campus still keeps its own spreadsheet, the dictionary becomes one more thing to interpret. Someone will copy last year's template, someone will add a column, and the drift begins again.
Numbers stay consistent when the setup itself enforces the definitions. That means the same fee heads at every campus, the same attendance categories, the same student statuses and the same grading scales, all configured once and used everywhere. When a late arrival can only be marked as "late", and "late" means the same thing at every campus, nobody has to remember the rule.
It also means the figures come from the day-to-day records rather than from a summary someone prepared. A collection total built from the actual receipts cannot quietly include promises to pay, because a promise is not a receipt.
Make the group view a view, not a project
Once every campus records the same way, the group report stops being something a person assembles. It becomes something a person opens. The owner can see the group total and each campus beside it on any day of the month, not only after the finance manager has chased the last reply.
Two practical habits help here:
- Fix a reporting date. Agree that the monthly figures are read as at a set day, for example the third working day, after campuses have finished recording the previous month. Figures read earlier are provisional and labelled as such.
- Freeze, do not edit. Once a month's figures have gone to the owner or board, corrections are made as adjustments in the next period with a note, not by rewriting history. Otherwise last month's pack and this month's pack disagree about last month.
Common mistakes
- Defining measures only at the top. If campus staff were not involved, they will apply the definitions loosely or not at all.
- Allowing local extra categories. One campus adding "excused late" breaks comparison for every attendance figure that follows.
- Mixing provisional and final figures. A number read on the first day of the month and the same number read on the fifth will differ. Label which one you are looking at.
- Changing a definition silently. Definitions will need to change occasionally. When they do, record the date and restate the previous months if the change is material.
- Treating the dictionary as finished. Review it once a year, and whenever a campus raises a case it does not cover.
An illustration: settling the attendance argument
Consider a group of three campuses where the owner, Mr Okonkwo, keeps asking why the hillside campus reports much higher attendance than the other two. The hillside principal, Ms Lindqvist, insists her families are simply more engaged. The other principals suspect counting.
The group agrees four attendance categories: present, late, absent and authorised absence. Late counts as attended for the attendance rate, but late is reported separately so it can be watched. Authorised absence is excluded from neither: it counts as absence in the rate, and appears separately so the reason is visible. Every campus is configured with exactly these four and no others.
The next month, hillside's rate falls a little and the other two rise a little, because hillside had been recording authorised absences as present and the others had been recording late as absent. The gap narrows to something real and small. Hillside does still lead, and now the leadership team can ask Ms Lindqvist what she does differently with a straight face, because everyone trusts the figure.
Frequently asked questions
Who should own the data dictionary?
Usually the group finance lead or head of operations, with a named person at each campus responsible for applying it. Ownership means approving changes and answering "how do we count this?" questions, not doing all the recording.
Do campuses lose flexibility?
They lose flexibility in how things are counted, not in how they are run. A campus can still run its own follow-up calls, events and timetables. It just records the results the same way as everyone else.
What if two campuses genuinely need different fee items?
Keep a shared list of fee heads and let a campus leave some unused. A campus without a bus service simply has no transport fees; it does not need its own name for the same thing.
Where to go next
Consistent definitions are the foundation for everything else a group does, from fair comparisons to board reporting. The full picture is in our guide to managing a multi-campus school group. If you want to see how Scolvia reports each campus on its own and the group together from the same entries, the reports module and the multi-campus overview cover it.