What a TEFA audit packet actually contains

Sooner or later a state ESA program asks a participating school to show that the funds it received were used the way the program intended. The document you hand over is, informally, an audit packet. There is no glossy template for it, which is exactly why it makes operators nervous. Here is what one actually contains and what a reviewer is looking for, so you can keep the records all year instead of reconstructing them under a deadline.

What an audit packet is for

An audit packet answers one question: for this quarter, for each funded student, was the money invoiced, received, and matched to a real enrolled student who was actually attending? Think of it less as a financial statement and more as a dated, per-student trail a reviewer can follow from “the state funded this student” to “the school recorded the money and the attendance.”

What a reviewer actually checks

Across state ESA programs, the same handful of items come up:

• Per-student funding. The award or invoiced amount for each ESA-funded student, what was expected, and what was actually received, with dates.
• Attendance evidence. A count of days attended in the reporting period per student. The state is confirming the student was really there, not enrolled on paper.
• Enrollment status. That each funded student was enrolled for the period the funds covered.
• Compliance items. That required steps for the period (vendor in good standing, any state-required filing, background clearances) were complete and dated.
• A certification. A statement, dated and attributable to the operator, that the records are accurate.

Notice what is not on the list: lesson plans, photos, or anything about the children themselves beyond attendance and progress. A reviewer is checking the money and the enrollment, not grading your school.

The records you have to keep all year

The packet is only easy to produce if the underlying records exist and are dated as they happen. That means, per student, per quarter: the invoice (ESA portion and any out-of-pocket portion), the deposit received and its date, the attendance count, and the compliance steps that came due. The single biggest mistake is treating this as a year-end task. A reviewer can ask mid-year, and a spreadsheet you planned to “clean up in May” will not survive a December request.

Why a spreadsheet struggles here

A spreadsheet is fine for holding numbers. It is poor at producing a per-student, per-quarter export that foots to the invoice totals and carries the dates a reviewer expects. The moment you have more than a few students, or a family with two siblings on one award, or a deposit that arrived in two parts, the manual export becomes the place errors hide.

Where this lives in CohortLedger

CohortLedger generates the quarterly audit packet in one click: a per-student summary that joins each invoice to its attendance count, a compliance log, the totals, and a certification timestamp, as both a printable page and a CSV. Because it is built from the same dated records you keep all year, there is nothing to reconstruct when a request comes in. Most general school-management tools stop short of producing this state-facing export, which is the part we built around.

Related reading: how TEFA actually pays your school and what ESA documentation Florida actually requires.