In addition to the audited financial statements submission by the end of January, there is also a requirement for the online Accounts Return to be submitted by 23 February 2021, which became open for submission from 10 November 2020.
The main changes to previous years Accounts Return submissions are:
- counterparty data reporting now limited to transactions with the academy sector;
- the number of employees whose emoluments exceed £100k updated to include a dropdown menu with a list of job roles;
- new SoFA and benchmarking fields to report Coronavirus grant income;
- updated SoFA and benchmarking fields so that rental and letting income is separately from ‘Income from facilities and services’ in the Benchmarking section;
- new SoFA expenditure field to report revenue expenditure from capital funding;
- the ‘Employees whose emoluments exceed £100k’ now requires separate reporting by bands for salary, employer pension contributions and other benefits for each employee;
- the ‘Related party transaction: trustee remuneration’ table now has additional columns for trusts to confirm, for each band selected, whether or not it includes salary, employer pension contributions and other benefits;
- a new table, ‘Prior year (2018/19) data: Number of employees who emoluments exceed £60k and all paid trustees’ has been added. Trusts must provide, by bands, the full-time equivalent number of staff (above £60k), number of trustees paid as trustees and number of trustees paid as staff. Note that this data relates to the accounting period 1 September 2018 to 31 August 2019 and is a resubmission of the data provided in last year’s annual return and must include employer pension contributions and other benefits.
Prior year data – the last point noted above is the only area of the annual return where previously submitted data is required to be resubmitted. This data is required for comparability with the current year due to a significant number of academy trusts not including all benefits (in particularly employer’s pension contributions) within the disclosures submitted in the annual return 2019. Please ensure that you submit the correct data, inclusive of all benefits, even if that contrasts with the data submitted in annual return 2019 – explanations are not required for any change in the submitted data.
The next step
If there is any help or advice you require in relation to the new Accounts Return requirements, please contact your local UHY adviser or UHY academy schools specialist.
