Templates and Tools

Here are helpful tools to help you explain the budget to various audiences.

Budget Estimating Template
The Budget Estimating Template is designed to assist a district in identifying financial trends based upon a few basic assumptions about the future.  Local information and assumptions can be entered (red numbers) and the template will predict a district’s unspent balance over the next five years. While the simplicity of the template may reduce its accuracy, it does provide a quick method for identifying trends based upon a small number of assumptions.

School finance is a complicated subject—even at times for school administrators. The following resources are available to assist superintendents with managing and communicating about the school district’s budget:

Iowa Department of Education School Finance Tools:
http://www.iowa.gov/educate/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1625&Itemid=2420

School Administrators of Iowa “eLink for School Administrators”:
http://elink.sai-iowa.org/finance/index.html

Iowa Association of School Boards finance resources:
http://www.ia-sb.org/Finance.aspx

As more become available, additional templates and tools will be added to this section.