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Cottrill, Arbutina Professional Services provides school districts with specialized experience in accounting, budgeting, auditing and financial consulting, representing a sophisticated, contemporary approach to the effective management of school finances.

Clients include a cutting edge national cyber charter school foundation as well as a number of public K-12 school districts. The firm is intimately familiar with the tangled web of financial and budgetary issues facing government officials, school boards, administrators and teachers in today's complex society.

Representative school district clients are: National Network of Digital Schools Foundation, Beaver Area School District, Northgate School District, Beaver County Area Vocational Technical School, Pine-Richland School District, Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, Lincoln Park School for Performing Arts. Representative governmental clients: Avalon Borough, Borough of Beaver, New Brighton Borough, City of New Kensington, and Township of Pine.

Without a full-service professional accounting group, schools can be vulnerable to the effects of outdated processes, manual "work-arounds," insufficient controls, and staff-member turnover. Depending on the school business manager's areas of expertise, vision oriented financial planning may be limited. Cottrill Arbutina's diverse group of CPAs, staff accountants, analysts and project managers provide broad expertise and cost-effective approaches in an end-to-end accounting solution that cannot typically be achieved in-house.

We help schools in the following critical areas:

• Achieve accounting and financial goals
• Maintain and enhance accounting systems
• Manage change related to accounting management
• Manage finances under poor conditions
• Employ innovative web-based accounting technology
• Quickly and simply access necessary information
• Streamline accounting processes
• Plan for improved financial position

Our complete accounting management encompasses both day to day tasks and high level planning. You will be hiring an entire firm of accountants, auditors and consultants who are experienced in school district financial management and who provide continuity of service if and when school personnel would change. A partial list of services includes:

• Payroll and benefits - effectively managing a school's largest annually recurring expense
• Accounts receivable and accounts payable - providing experience and continuity of manpower over time
• Internal controls, audit policies and procedures - easily selecting from and adapting a broad range of policies and procedures we have developed for myriad other schools
• Accounting information systems consultation and implementation - receiving effective ideas based on our multiple conversions, installations and implementations of IT packages and systems.
• Business office management - using our expertise gained from managing multiple school business offices simultaneously to provide consulting solutions
• Budgeting and projections - benefit from our unbiased, outside opinion and realistic picture of budgets and projections
• Purchasing and inventory control - expertise on building systems to cost effectively manage purchases and reduce unnecessary cost for what is often a school district's second largest annual expenditure
• Compliance and reporting requirements for federal and state grants and awards - to help schools avoid disallowance of grant monies if the accounting is not properly managed
• Financial statement preparation and audits - assist with GASB 34 financial statements and prepare for annual audits
• Assistance with state and federal agency inquiries - we can intercede with governments and provide better answers on behalf of schools because we know what the questions are, what governments are seeking, and how to expedite answers.