Marilyn Yurkiw, manager of finance for the South East Cornerstone Public School Division, had a date with the division’s board members on May 19 as part of their general afternoon business session.
Yurkiw had been asked to go through a few details as to how the finance department operated and what they were responsible for on an ongoing basis.
She said there were four people in the department and a good deal of their time was spent scrutinizing and taking care of accounts payable. That included sending out about 7,000 cheques and making 15,000 electronic transfers on an annual basis.
The team also supports others in the management sector, who may need to use the accounting portal, and they also tracked the individual schools and their school-generated funds and budgets. There are 38 school facilities in Cornerstone with just over 8,200 students.
The department also works closely with the division’s management services sector and they are intimately involved with the budget processes including school-based budgets as well as the overall budget that currently exceeds $107 million.
Audited financial statements are the responsibility of the financial department so they pull that together yearly, plus they provide monthly and quarterly summarized financial statements for the board and the Ministry of Education.
“We also monitor all taxation submissions from 94 rural and urban municipalities,” said Yurkiw and they are also responsible for annual GST returns.
“We have had success with using a centralized credit card process which we can use for United States vendors we deal with, it replaces purchase orders and makes the currency exchange rate simpler,” she added.
The ongoing challenge, she admitted, was the collection of taxes from the various rural and municipalities. Late payment from them “impacts our financial situation and statements, and we can only report what they give us, not what they intend to send us,” she said.
Yurkiw said a software update is in the near future, since the older package now in use won’t be much longer.
