School smarts

East Central ISD, located in San Antonio, Texas, is a vibrant school district made up of 9200 of the best and brightest students Texas has to offer. Not only can students learn, create and flourish, they can take part in a multitude of activities from athletics to cheerleading to field trips. Keeping track of all of those transactions is a huge task that requires a reliable, digital solution.

East Central ISD teamed up with Active Network in 2008 to help create order from a flurry of checks, receipts and fundraisers. Previously, the district relied on a custom-made DOS-based solution that was good at cataloging items, but couldn’t track receipts or create reports. The program had outlived its usefulness and the district was on the hunt for a more Texas-like solution: bigger, better and far more robust. The results have been overwhelmingly positive and the school administrative software creates an ironclad audit trail that a Texas Ranger would be proud of.

Texas two-step with Shannon Burns, Finance Facilitator

How was the transition from your old DOS-based solution to our school admin software?

Making the switch from our old system to the new one was very easy. I pretty much handled it single-handedly. It was not difficult at all. My bookkeepers didn’t have a problem picking it up. They have all enjoyed it.

What are your favorite features?

I like the fact that I can go in and view any of the campuses at any time and the fact that they can reconcile their bank statements through the program. I like the different reporting options, especially the category reports.

How has the software’s audit trail helped your school?

The audit trail and bank reconciliations are wonderful internal control features which actually allowed us to detect fraud on a report submitted by a bookkeeper. After further investigation, additional significant irregularities were discovered.

Active Network’s customizable software solution can help your school prevent instances like this by creating an ironclad paper trail with several redundancies.

How much time does the school administrative software save you?

I’d say, on a monthly basis, it can probably save me, depending on the type of activity I want to review, two hours per school for things that I spot check. As far as year-end reviews, just hours and hours, because, the software we had before, it wouldn’t track anything. I would go to print a report and I would end up with a list of checks and a list of receipts but no alignment with one another, requiring additional time to audit.

On the high school level, when you are dealing with 75 activity accounts and they do three to four fundraisers a year and you try to manually go through and highlight, pull out paperwork and check how much they brought in and spent per activity, it is extremely time consuming. Now, we can just tag it [in the system] with a category and I can instantly pull that report. It saves a lot of review time.

"Making the switch from our old system to the new one was very easy. I pretty much handled it singlehandedly. It was not difficult at all."
– Shannon Burns – Finance Facilitator – East Central
ISD, San Antonio Texas

Your school can save time and energy just like East Central ISD! Contact us today for a needs analysis and stop doing things the old fashioned way. Our student accounting software is easily implemented and is perfect even for those with low to medium levels of computer experience. Don’t waste another day, contact Active Network today!