Background:

Twin Rivers Unified School District (TRUSD) serves approximately 27,000 preschool through adult education students in northern Sacramento County, CA. Its mission is to inspire each student to extraordinary achievement every day and maintain an unwavering focus on powerful and engaging learning experiences that prepare students for college, career and life success. In 2006, TRUSD formally became Grant Unified by combining three elementary districts with a high school district. Denisa Marquez was hired as the District’s fiscal analyst to improve auditing findings and in particular address the ticketing issues at sporting events. She immediately integrated Active Network’s school administration software to help counteract the financial and operational issues the schools were facing.

Challenge

The main challenge that TRUSD faced was a lack of financial control. The District was getting hit year after year with audit findings. One big area of concern was the revenue originating from the tickets sold at sporting events. The process was very manual.

• School staff would sit at ticket booths or tables to sell pre-numbered tickets at the gate.
• Ticket takers would have to calculate total cost in their head (causing errors) and wait as people made decisions or changed their minds. This caused long lines, frustrations and safety issues because of over-crowding.
• All cash that was collected was stuffed in a cash box.
• After the event, the staff logged the beginning and ending ticket numbers in order to get an attendance estimate, assuming that someone remembered to write down the beginning number on the first ticket.
• Each ticket taker would count their cash box and total it on a piece of paper.
• At the end of the night, cash boxes were locked up with the tickets. The following Monday, the bookkeeper would count the cash and fill out the deposit paperwork. The cash rarely matched what the ticket takers had recorded, the ticket tally sheet often had errors and the entire process took hours of time.

“We needed a way to keep better track of our revenue, in addition to getting people through the gates more quickly and making it easier on the ticket takers,” noted Marquez. “We couldn’t continue to operate like that.”

Solution

TRUSD researched several different companies and programs looking for the right school administration software that would let them manage receipting with greater ease and accuracy. It was soon decided that Active Network had the best fitting solution for the District.

Active’s school administration software software automatically tracks TRUSD’s sales of any school item and includes integrated point-of-sale and web store functionality. The technology can:

• Collect payments or sell tickets.
• Process credit card payments and print bar codes.
• Track everything from equipment to donations.

It’s easy enough that any ticket taker can pick it up quickly and comprehensive enough that TRUSD can integrate all operations for a comprehensive, accurate view of every transaction. “Active’s school administration software is designed to be user friendly and makes it much easier for us to manage the ticketing at events and receipting,” notes Marquez. “It allowed us to move everything to laptops, which is faster and much more secure.”

Results

Not only did the long lines at the ticket gate disappear, but so did the audit findings. TRUSD went from having different schools on archaic programs, Excel sheets or Quicken and dealing with negative publicity from audit findings to a clean audit bill of health. For the past three years since implementing Active’s school administration software, TRUSD has had zero audit findings.

The District has also seen significant benefits from the detailed reporting provided by the system. The Sales by Receipt report is the most commonly used report, which lets users filter by receipt number, date, customer, price and more. Plus, it displays a summary by department or by general ledger to cash account. TRUSD also relies upon the event attendance tracking reports and can now accurately view exactly how many people attended each sporting event, even broken down by type (e.g. adult, student, senior, etc). This helps the staff predict how much food to buy for the snack bars, how many security officers to have on hand and in general prepare for the game. School clubs have also begun to sell yearbooks, spirit wear and other merchandise at games and on the online web store with Active’s technology, adding additional revenue streams and maximizing the opportunity to reach the community.

“Hands down Active was the best choice for us,” says Marquez. “Immediately our audit findings disappeared and they have a fully supportive staff that can help you roll out programs like the web store. We love Active Network.”