The Report of the Board Secretary (BSR) Tab

Modified on Wed, Aug 7 at 8:03 AM

New Jersey State statute (N.J.S.A. 18A:17-9) and administrative code (N.J.A.C. 6A:23A-16.2(h)) require that the board secretary prepare monthly financial statement and reports on the district and present them to the Board of Education at each regular meeting.

Overview of the Report of the Board Secretary

The Report of the Board Secretary is an interim financial report that provides the board of education and district administrators with an overall picture of the financial status of the district. It assists the board of education in ensuring that estimated revenues are being sufficiently realized to support current operations, that the actual expenditures do not exceed approved appropriations, and promotes a better awareness of the budget-to-actual status. Additionally, through an updated monthly listing of assets, liabilities, and equity, it provides information on what is known as the financial position of the district; that is, what it owns, what it owes, and the status of its surplus. Under a double-entry system, these balances are updated as transactions are recorded.

The Report of the Board Secretary is organized in a manner that provides a layering of detail. It is comprised of four components:

The Interim Balance Sheet;
The Interim Statements Comparing Budgeted Revenue with Actual to Date and Appropriations with Expenditures and Encumbrances to Date;
The Schedule of Revenues — Actual Compared with Estimated; and
The Statement of Appropriations Compared with Expenditures and Encumbrances.

The New Jersey Department of Education publishes the following resources for the BSR Report:

To review, analyze and prepare the Report of the Board Secretary, you can go to the following tab:

To view the financial information for any of the schedules within a particular fund, fir, select the year and month in the yellow bat and then click on the Analyze button.

There a limited number of display options, highlighted in the red box below. When the information is analyzed, SchoolFi takes a "snapshot" of all the financial data and displays it on the BSR tabs. The date and time of the snapshot creation is noted in the purple box below. PLEASE NOTE that is a transaction is processed AFTER the data is analyzed, the transaction WILL NOT be included in the data on the screen. The user should click on the Reanalyze Account Data button to include all transactions. After 15 minutes, the system will prompt the user to reanalyze the account data.

Helpful Tips for reviewing the information in a BSR tab

Whenever you see a "bubble" with an "R" before a number, this is a Reference. The reference is a check / verification of the number to another number in the BSR for the respective fund. You can click on the bubble to see the detail for the reference. If the background is green, then the reference is "good", if the background is red, there is an issue and the District should review accordingly.

You can also easily access the detailed accounts for any individual BSR line either by clicking on the BSR line number hyperlink or by clicking on the bubble that denotes the number of individual accounts assigned the respective BSR line number.

Printing the Report of the Board Secretary

If the District wants to include the Business Administrator signature section when the BSR is printed, navigate to the Settings tab and check the option highlighted below.

When you are on the BSR tab, each screen will give you the option of printing the current page, printing the entire fund or printing all funds.

Please note the Report of the Board Secretary tab only contains Funds 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40. The Department of Education was very specific in clarifying the level of reporting for the Report of the Board Secretary. More specifically, the documentation notes "it should be noted that even if a district chooses to implement an expanded coding structure, the Report of the Board Secretary must still be presented using the minimum outline format". Due to this limitation the Board Secretary report can only be produced for Funds 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 in the format prescribed by the Department of Education.

Some Districts may want to produce a Report of the Board Secretary for a fund other than Funds 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40. We recommend the District utilize the Profit and Loss Statement along with the Balance Sheet (Condensed) report for these funds (other than 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40).