Eikaiwa Admin Dev Diary #5 - Expenses and Payroll History

I've made two very important additions to Eikaiwa Admin over the last week, working feverishly through the bank holiday weekend to complete the historical tracking capabilities of the system.

Tracking expenses

The "Big Three" accounting and expense systems in Japan are Yayoi, freee, and Money Forward Cloud. Businesses use them to snap receipts, connect Japanese bank accounts, and handle their bookkeeping and tax prep.

So Eikaiwa Admin isn't meant to, and couldn't possibly, replace that. However, a school owner or manager needs to see the financial health of their school at a glance. To do that, I've add an Expenses section that allows you to add approximate, recurring expenses.

The categories are Rent, Utilities, Materials, Supplies, Fees, Taxes, Insurance, Marketing, and Other. You can add expenses for each, take a rough guess at their cost, and set the months in which they are applied.

As with lesson and billing records, once a month, these expenses are archived so that any future changes you make won't inadvertently break your old records.

Tracking staff payments

Until now, the system could only work with current wages and salaries. I need to add a Staff Payroll History section to go alongside the Expenses section.

On billing day, a staff member's earnings for the previous month are calculated and saved into an archive, along with any recurring or one-off adjustments such as transportation, insurance, bonuses or whatever you decide to add... or take away!

When viewing the Payroll History, you can click on a teacher and see a complete itemized breakdown of what lessons were taught, at what rate, and what adjustments were made and why.

This seems pretty important to me. If a teacher has a payment dispute, you can bring up the data to figure out exactly what the mistake or misunderstanding is.

Financial overview

To wrap up all this money stuff, I reworked the Financial Overview page to show a complete health check of your school's money, drawing from billing, expenses and payroll history, for every month since you started tracking the data.

Next steps

I should be working on the wiki-like info boxes for each page, and the Japanese translations, but I'm beginning to feel as though they can wait till the end.

I haven't decided which task to knock-off the list yet, but a File Uploads section would be very useful for a school manager. For example, sign-up forms, student surveys, anything that he or she might want to quickly access and send to the printer from a phone.