IRIS Accounts Production - Academy Accounts Update 2021

The preparation of Statutory Accounts for Academies can often be a complex process and a time sensitive assignment. 

The Department of Education provides annual updates to the Academies Account Direction (AAD) and accountants prepare these accounts in the same condensed few weeks each year. 

That is owing to Academies almost exclusively using 31st August year-ends and subsequent submissions to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) the following January. 

As with every year at IRIS, the Accounts Production team reviews the AAD and supporting documentation to understand the updates and implement these changes into the software to help you, our customers, to produce compliant accounts.  This year has been no different and we have worked in two main areas.

The first has been centred around the disclosure changes in the AAD for 2020/21:

• Grants disclosure in Funding for the academy trust’s educational operations note
• Grant Expenditure in the Statement of Financial Activity (SoFA) and supporting notes
• Restricted Fixed Asset fund column within the SoFA and Balance Sheet and Net Assets Analysis.
• Central Services
• Long term commitments, including operating leases
• Guarantees Letter of Comfort and Indemnities

The second has been driven by customers asking for our template accounts to resemble the model set of accounts produced by the Department of Education.

The new areas adopted are as follows,

• Members Liability
• Pensions and similar obligations – for both the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) and Teachers Pension Scheme (TPS)
• Related Party Transactions

In each instance we allow customers to add to the standard notes or fully replace where needed.

These changes are available in our latest release of the software, available some weeks ago in readiness for use in early September.