On a deserted school campus, the clatter of the keyboards and the ringing of phones is constant in one room.

Welcome to the accounts office, the most busy place in the school in the last few months.

The mailbox is full, the phone calls are incessant and the personnel in the school accounts office are buried in calculations.

One template that could be followed for all students is no longer effective and the accounts offices across schools are doing calculations specific to individual requests.

Questions from parents range from how much they have to pay if they opt for waiver in the last two quarters, or how much they need to pay if they want the fees adjusted for the previous months where they have paid 100 per cent, or how much they have to pay if they opt for instalments.

“In some cases, parents are calculating on their own and paying. The accounts office then has to tally and tell them what is due,” said the principal of a school in south Calcutta.

In several schools, for 2,000 to 3,500-odd students on their rolls, there are at the most two to three people in the accounts section and in smaller schools, there is one person behind the counter.

In one school, the accounts office has asked the management for recruitment, in another, the school has provided them with a help desk. One has asked a few teachers to help.

There are instances when the regular working hours have been extended or work is being carried home, unlike what used to be, at least two school officials said.

“Schools had computerised their accounts so three people handling the accounts was comfortable. But now the calculations are long and unique and hence, the work has increased tremendously,” said Amita Prasad, the director of Indus Valley World School.

The school has deputed an additional workforce of four people to help out.

“Earlier, we would reach out to parents with printed notices but now it is via emails or the school app. There has to be follow-up phone calls also,” said Prasad.

Previously, each class had a particular fee slab and parents who defaulted, were sent emails.

“The receipt of payment too was uniform and easy to calculate. But now parents are calculating the 80 per cent according to their interpretation and the school has it own numbers. Besides, there are some who can not pay 80 per cent. There are many variants to the amount of payment and with a large number of students, calculation is a nightmare,” said Brigadier (retd) V. N. Chaturvedi, the secretary general of Vidya Mandir Society, which runs Birla High School, Sushila Birla Girls’ School and Birla High School Mukundapur.

The management of at least two schools agreed that with fresh and different payments being made everyday, doing an analysis on the exact figures is a daunting task.

“The calculations have become cumbersome. The accounts office has to check whether a student is entitled to additional waivers,” said Krishna Damani, a trustee of South Point, which has 12,000 students.

In Calcutta Girls’ High School, the support staff are lending a hand to the accounts office by tallying numbers. “Its a huge task now because they also have to make manual reconciliations. And we cannot ask people from other departments because accounting is a specialised job,” said Basanti Biswas, the principal.

In The Newtown School, there are three hands now instead of four. “One person had to quit for personal reasons and the department is asking for more hands. But it isn’t easy to find a replacement,” said founder-director Sunil Agarwal.

“The volume of data has increased and it is difficult to handle now because almost each ledger is different and has to be dealt with individually,” he added.

The accounts office also has to bear the brunt of parents’ grievances on emails and over phones.

“With so many emails everyday, it is difficult to answer each promptly,” said a school official.

A senior accountant in a city school said the calculations have gone up this year because the fee has been revised several times this year.

“It is hard to keep a tab of who is paying and who is not. Parents have been asked to send emails but not all of them are doing so,” said Uttam Sardar, accounts manager at Indus Valley World School.

In Chowringhee High School, the management has requested a few of the teachers to help out with the calculations.