How Canadian Districts Are Modernizing School Activity Fund Management 

Eilidh Lindsay-Sinclair 0:08
Welcome everyone. We're so glad to have you with us today. My name is Ailey and I'm on the marketing team here at SparkRock. We've got a really great group of folks joining us today. Thank you so much for spending the next 45 minutes with us.
Today's webinar is called How Canadian Districts are Modernizing School Activity Fund Management, and it's really designed for folks that are familiar with School Day and are looking to get a look at the platform. We're going to go through an end-to-end demo, and then we'll have time at the end for questions.
Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. If you could please keep your mics on mute during the session. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat or in the Q&A. We'll be monitoring for questions, and then we'll have time at the end to address those questions. Lastly, we will be giving everyone the recording for this within five business days of today's session.
And to kick things off, we'd love to hear from everyone on the call. A poll should pop up now. We'd love to hear from folks what your greatest challenge is in managing school activity funds at the moment.
I'll just give everyone a second to answer that poll.

Bri-anna Ramsden 1:29
The poll is anonymous, so you don't need to worry about your names being recorded. All you got to do is click some buttons and submit your vote.
We are seeing a lot of people are saying lack of single integrated payment and forms process for parents.

Eilidh Lindsay-Sinclair 2:26
Great. Well, I think we're going to get into that a little bit in the demo today, so that's awesome.
Thanks so much for filling out the poll, everyone. I'm going to pass it over to David now, who'll be walking us through the demo today. David, over to you.

David Parisi 2:42
Thank you very much, Ailey. Thank you for the introduction, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Just very quickly, some introductions so you know who we all are. Ailey already introduced herself there, so thank you, Ailey. Myself, I'm David Parisi, formerly the CEO of School Day, currently the GM of School Day and the VP of Revenue.
at Spark Rock. We've also got Paula Wilhelm. Paula, you want to just wave, say a quick hello.

Paula Wilhelm 3:07
Hello. Hi, everyone. As David mentioned, my name is Paula Wilhelm. I'm a customer success manager here at Spark Rock, previously with School Day and prior to that with the Warda Region District School Board. I work closely with all the school districts to help them implement School Day. And thanks for having me at the meeting today.

David Parisi 3:29
Great, thank you very much. Some of you may be familiar with Paula already if you've used the system and interacted with us.
Just quickly, an overview of the company itself. We've joined the Spark Rock family a little over a year ago now, and it really is a complete ecosystem for the K to 12 environment. So on top of the School Day program, which we'll show you today, which has parent payments and forms, Spark Rock itself also has a complete ERP with finance, HR,
payroll, and an employee portal. And of course, we also have the SIS system with Assembly that gives you a teacher portal and a family portal as well. Really, this just gives us, again, a complete ecosystem from start to finish. And we'll talk a little bit today about how the information from School Day can flow in to some of the other programs, specifically the finance ERP and the SIS system.
And then just a few more things about the company. We are associated with Microsoft. We are completely on the Azure server environment. It gives us enhanced security and all those great Microsoft services and upgrades. And we're really pushing an AI-powered and mobile-optimized system. So AI.
as I'm sure you all hear about more and more often, is a big part of what we're doing today and into our future. If there's some questions about that at the end, happy to dive into the ways that we're using the technology to increase our service levels for you and some things within the system as well. And then I'll show you a little bit what our mobile optimized system looks like as well.
But we do have some things that we want to make sure that we show you today, so we'll move on.
We are currently in use right across the country. That's from BC all the way through to Ontario. And it is a completely bilingual system as well. So I'll give you a little sense of how easy it is to switch between French and English. And we're really excited to have both our French clients and English clients using the system successfully in our two official languages.
We spend a lot of time making sure that we have proper translations in the system and that all of our documentation is available in French as well for any of our French or prospective French users.
And we are very much hands-on in terms of how we get the system set up for you and our project management. Should you decide to kick off a project with us, you'll get very familiar with Paula and myself. We really do manage the full implementation process. Not enough time really today to review that, but we're happy to set up a different demo or another
call with you directly if you want to hear exactly how we do help the project management go smoothly within your district. Paula has an enormous amount of experience and you can see she's been called out here as well as Peter, who's not with us today. But we have a very deep experienced team. We really walk you through every step of getting the system implemented.
and make sure that it's not a burden on your resources internally. We have everything mapped out and can make the implementation go very, very smooth. We really think this helps drive the adoption as well. And our adoption across all of our clients right now is somewhere between 93 and 94%. So the parents really use the system. It's very active within your district.
that really helps you make sure that all of the advantages of the system can be realized because you really need the parents using it to make sure that it's a successful implementation for you.
Now I just want to give some high level information about what our goals are with the system and how we set it up just before we jump into the system itself, just to give you some context. So one of the things we really want to do is introduce some automation in a few of these processes where maybe you haven't had them before. And the three main buckets that really touches is income, expenses, and reporting.
I won't go through every single point. Again, we're happy to share this video and the presentation with you. But there's a few things that we do within the system to, again, make sure that we cut down on some of the manual work, increase the automation, and save you some time and improve the accuracy. So one of the things you'll see on the income side is that at the time of purchase,
All of the income is automatically allotted to the correct revenue accounts. What that means is at the end of your month or as you're doing your reconciliations, you don't have to go through all of the income you've received and try to figure out which account you need to allot it for. That's all happening at the moment of the purchase. And so we can save some time and increase the accuracy there. And that also goes with the expenses.
So there's no ability, for example, to print checks within the system and not have it tied in to an existing ledger account. But that also includes things like online fees. So we journal entry all of the fees, again, at the time of purchase, so that at the end of the month, you don't have to figure out, well, how much from each of these revenue accounts am I going to pull to cover off any fees that I've seen.
We can automate that full process for you, journal entry it into a separate GL account. And again, try to save you that time and that effort of figuring out where all this income needs to go to. The third piece is really the reporting, and I'll walk you through what an automated report can look like. There's multiple options for the way you can reconcile within School Day, and I'll talk about that in a few slides.
But the main thing is we want to make sure during our pilots we figure out all of the formats that you need for your reports, and then we try to automate as many of those as possible. So that can just be the difference between a user having to go into the system, let's say log in, generate a report themselves. Instead, we can deliver it directly to either an email address or a server location.
on a time sequence to again save you that time and really try to automate as much of this process as we possibly can for you.
Now in terms of how we set up the system, we really do like to leverage the information that you already have at the district. What that means in practice is all of the general ledger codes we want to take from your existing finance program and the same thing for all of your student class and teacher assignments. We really want to grab that from the SIS.
so that there's no manual creation of those accounts within School Day. We pull those from your centralized systems, and then we have processes that can sync those on a nightly basis to make sure that you really don't have to change the way, for example, you manage your students in classes. You continue to do that within the SIS. We grab the information on a nightly basis and sync it so that every morning...
you know when you go into School Day, you're completely up to date with your student, class, and teacher structure, and also all of the accounts that we might need to pull in. So if you've made a new general ledger account, for example, and you want that to come into School Day so your schools can use it, we have automated systems to ensure that we're completely up to date with both the finance and the SIS.
Now, once we get all that information in there, we connect you to a parent payment provider. We have a few different partners and we're always looking for new and improved partners on that space. The main thing to take away from that is at no time do we or do you have direct access to credit card information. This one keeps you compliant with PCI compliance, but two, it's really just about safety. I think everyone
understands. It's a more and more challenging world out there in terms of internet safety. So what we really like to do is make sure that we have very limited information within the system so that it, you know, even if the worst happens and it was to breach, we don't have any credit card information, you don't have any credit card information, nor do we have any access to the funds themselves.
All of the funds are deposited directly into your bank account, and we really feel like this is the best hands-off way to make sure that you get all of the money directly to you. The parents have the convenience of paying with their cards, but the security around those cards is really the top that we can provide. Now, once we have those pieces set up, the parents sign up.
Again, this is to make sure we're compliant with CASL and you don't have to worry about that. The parent signs up, agrees to the terms of use, and agrees to be communicated with so that you know you're on side of the privacy statutes and of the CASL communications. Again, we're trying to make it as easy as possible for you and as secure as possible so we don't have to get you to send us parent information in advance, for example. All of that is provided by the parent and you
have to worry about the security or pinging your parents to make sure that you do get their information in advance. Now, once all those pieces are done, the admins and the teachers can go through and create items within the system. Items are really the building block of School Day, and I'll show you what those look like directly in the system. And then that gives us the complete infrastructure that we need to make sure that your parents can pay.
But then centrally and at the school, you both receive the funds, and all of those funds are completely tracked for you.
Now, just within a little bit more detail, we have this set up as SparkRock Finance. We obviously prefer that you use the SparkRock Finance program, but we are completely agnostic on this. So we work with multiple finance systems throughout the marketplace, and we can work with multiple SIS systems. They don't have to be our internal products. The benefit
of them being internal is we can handle all that data exchange sort of behind the curtain and you don't really have to get involved. If it's an external system, there may be some imports and exports that we work with you to create. But what you're seeing here is really the life cycle of what happens to the financial information. So what starts resident within your finance program, we export
those ledger accounts to School Day. You create an item with School Day that you tag with one of those accounts. So for example, if we're going on a field trip, we might tag that with our field trip GL account. And then a user purchases the event, and we make sure that we log in various places everything that's happened. So the revenue account is going to get the revenue for that.
purchase. We create a fee account, which we can journal entry a certain amount to make sure that you can cover any fees that are associated with the online. And then we also record what we expect to see in the bank account or the asset account. Now that we have those pieces of information, we've essentially populated the GL with the transactional and details, and then we can send it back to your finance system in whatever format and sequence you need.
so that we have that full cycle. So the ledgers come over to us essentially empty. We populate them with information, and then we send them back to your finance system to make sure that you have that one centralized view.
And when we talk about reconciliation, we really have two big buckets that we can handle. And that's either an exported reconciliation, which is what we're going to demonstrate for you today, or something newer for us, which is internal reconciliation. The exported reconciliation really looks like a little bit what you saw in that former slide. We pull in the ledgers, we populate them,
We format with the correct time sequencing and column setup, whatever you need for import, and then we send that information back to you. A little bit newer for us is you're able to also do that internally. What that means is you have all of your school day information, and you can either load a bank statement and physically match the lines.
between what you see in School Day to what you see in your bank statement. Or you can use it just as a standalone School Day side. So if you can imagine, you're going to pick the batches that actually made it to your bank account that month. Anything that didn't, you put into a suspense account. You then close that month, and we can export the finance information in the same way.
So a little bit of nuance just between those. Again, what we're going to show you today is the exported reconciliation and what that looks like. We're happy to set up additional demos for people in the future if you'd like to see what the internal reconciliation looks like. That also includes checks and invoices and vendors. And again, it's a bit more intensive. So that's almost a demo on its own. But please do sign up with us and we're happy to show you more of what an internal reconciliation.
reconciliation looks like in depth.
I believe that's my pause for the demo, so if you'll just bear with me, I'm going to share my screen here.
Now, I've logged in in advance just to save you the pain of watching me type as I get myself settled here. And what you're looking at is an administrator view into a school within our setup, our demo setup here. So this is the School Day public school within the School Day school board. All of the information that you're going to see is anonymous.
And you can see at a glance, as the administrator, I have control over the whole system. Just A brief note on some of our user accounts. We have accounts at the district level and then accounts at the school level. At the district level, you have the ability to oversee all schools or drive right down into one school and, for example, take over as the administrator for that school.
And then at an individual school, you can be an admin, a principal, or a teacher. The principal is the top level account. They can do all of the financial activities and they're the only ones that can approve checks. The administrator is a bit like a super teacher, so they can see all of the finance information, also take over the classes and communicate either directly with one class
or to the whole school at once. And then a teacher only has access to whatever classes they've been assigned within the SIS. So when we pull over that teacher and class data, we also have the assignment. It really just means when your teacher logs in, if they teach grade 8, all they're going to see on their dashboard and have access to is the grade 8 class.
Now this school is set up to have approvals on. You can see pending approvals. What that means is it just gives you another level of control. If you want your teachers to, let's say, create an item, but have the office approve it before it goes out to the parents, that is approvals. You can also change that without contacting us. It's really up to just you.
at the school level. You can see you can edit your school type and you have certain options for the language. If we select this to French, you'll very quickly see the entire board will change to French. And then, sorry, I'm just going to go back.
Keep myself on English. And we have the ability to turn on or off some buttons within the system. And I'll show you what that looks like. We really look at this as a transitionary system. You can pay just online or you can give your users the ability to pay cash as well. We're going to keep this at online and cash so I can show you what that looks like. And you can see right now I have this to acquire approval.
If I want to change that to no, I can, but we're going to keep it as it is for now.
And then I want to quickly walk you through what really the life cycle of an item is within the system, just to highlight how the information comes together. And then we'll show you what it looks like from the parent side. And then I want to show you what that finance information looks like if we're going to export it for reconciliation. You can see I clicked on that little plus to add. These are all the items within our system. Each one has its own purpose.
And the idea is this is to make it easy for you for common things that might happen at the school level. So an announcement is just a text announcement that gets blasted out to your parents. Again, we can use the organization we have within the system. So it can go to the whole school, can go to an individual class. You can even drill it down and just send it to individual people if you wanted to.
A fee is something that gets assigned to a specific student. So as opposed to, let's say, a product or an event, that's a little bit more like a storefront. You can choose it as an optional item. If you want to track mandatory fees or track things in a bit more of an accounts receivable, who's paid, who hasn't, that would be the fee. It also allows you to pay a larger amount down in pieces. So maybe you have a big trip.
at the end of the year, and you want to assign it at the start of the year to give parents the opportunity to pay it in installments, the fee will allow you to do that. And just briefly to touch on service as well, this one has an open-ended price. So for example, for fundraisers, if you want to just put in a minimum, assign that object to a specific charity account, and then let the parents pay whatever they want.
That's what we generally use our services for. But I'm going to quickly walk you through what an event looks like. This is very typically something like a field trip, because it just shows you how all the pieces come together. I won't actually save this one. We'll go back and execute on one that's already been created. But I do want to show you just how quickly this comes together and where all those.
information pieces we talked about initially come into the system and then can be used and accessed by the admins and the teachers. So I mentioned we pull everything in from the SIS. This is where all of this structure comes from. Again, I'm signed in as the admin, excuse me. Fighting off a little cold. They always seem to come up right before a webinar.
But this gives me the ability to select who I want this event to go to. In this case, I'll pick the whole school because I'm an admin, but I can just choose an individual classroom. And you'll see this text box show up on almost all of our windows. It gives you the ability to narrow down if you want to just type in and find one class specifically, for example, you have the ability to do that.
In this case, let's just select the whole school.
A view only event, the default is no. That means it's a full service event. If we say yes, you can see our items have changed down here. This is really something that just repeats. It gets onto your parent's calendar, but they don't have to take action each week. So maybe there's going to be a practice every week. You want the calendar of the parent to be updated. You might make it a view only event.
But in this case, we're going to look at what a full event is. And you can see again, my choices have changed here below. I have more start dates and end dates and costs and forms that can be attached. So this is really where our CIS information comes into play. We find users are very familiar with this web form.
type of a format. The little red stars mean these fields are mandatory. Those actually get pulled into permission forms as well, so that you always have a dynamic form and that you have informed consent. So essentially anything that a user sees with a red star, they have to fill out and it can be pulled into a permission form so that when a parent views the form attached to this event, they're going to see the specific title.
the specific venue, the date, and the start time to again make sure that parent is giving you full informed consent, even though it is a digital form.
We try to use fields to eliminate errors wherever we can. So you can see if we're going to choose start dates. We have a little calendar pop-up. And then we have a few things that we have added to the systems based on feedback we get from the clients. We started the system in about 2010, and it's really an iterative system. We have ongoing user groups.
We're really interested in the way you use the systems, things that we can improve. This is just an example of that. We found initially, we'd heard from schools, sometimes they set up the entire year's worth of events right at the start of the year. This is just a way to send them a reminder. So maybe I built this in September, but it's happening in June. I'll get a little email reminder three days before to just go in, see if everyone's paid and send out reminders.
There's a number of items like that through the system. We won't have time to talk about them all today, but I did just want to highlight as a way that we really try to think about how can we, again, automate things, improve the time that you need to spend on these items within the office, and just make things easier because we know there's a ton of things always going on.
We talked about also the ledger accounts. This is where that comes into play. So you'll see payment category is a required field. And this is all of the information that we would pull from the finance system. These are the ledgers that we're going to populate with the transaction information. And again, once we've selected this, I now don't have to worry about assigning the revenue from this item.
to that account. It will happen automatically at the time of purchase. We track that and then we can pull it onto those reconciliation reports so that you can see not only the dollars that went through the system, but what ledger accounts they're affecting.
This is a little tool that we've added to make the journal entries of the fees a little bit easier and to help explain that to your offers users. They may not be familiar with online payments and how the fees work on it. So what this does is allow you to put aside a certain percentage of the revenue to cover any fees that might come in. And it's just a very, very easy way to do it. So if your users
want to go off of the actual cost for the item, meaning how much do you need to recover? That's the actual cost. This is not displayed to the parent. This is just an internal cost calculator for you. But let's say for this event I needed to recover $10, then it'll tell you, you should display to the parent 10.30, and this 30 cents
gets journal entry into a revenue fee account. So that again, we have, excuse me, a way to track and put aside the revenue from each individual event. And you don't have to worry about doing any of that manually. It also works the other way. If we want to make sure it's a round number, we can say 11, then it'll say your actual revenue will be 1068. And again, we'll journal entry.
The difference into a fee account.
You also have the ability to set deadlines for payment. You know, if this is happening on a Friday, but you need all the money by a Monday, you can make sure that you separate out those two dates and prevent that into the parent. And then I do want to touch on the forms. It looks like from the poll, there's a number of people that would prefer these to be integrated. And it's as simple as this. We set up all of these forms with you generally during our pilot.
You can add them ad hoc, but we do try to get them all set up for you at the start of the year. And then your user creating the event just has to click on the form. And it's as simple as that. This form now, and I'll show you what it looks like, will be completely personalized to this event and to the person. So it will have your block legal language, but then we'll also include.
the user that's signing it, the student that they're signing it for, and the individual date and time and specific information. You can add multiple forms if you need onto the same event. Maybe it's out of province, maybe there's going to be informed dissent or high risk. Whatever forms you need to add, there's really no limit, and you can add as many as you need.
And then we also have the ability to add something called a standard event form. So these forms are waivers, they're permission forms, they must be signed for a user to go on the trip. Again, giving you some business level controls to ensure that somebody can't pay for something that they haven't signed a form for. But then there can also be optional forms. And one example is...
is if you need a volunteer. It's as simple as clicking this button. You'll see this will open up a new box. You can put in a description. This will go out to the parents, and then you can approve or deny volunteers for each event. And then let's say our board has a standard form for that for a volunteer driver. Again, this is something that can be standardized at the.
at the district level, and then it's just a quick selection from the dropdown for your users. So now within this single event, we've been able to add the payments, we're able to journal entry all of the fees for it, we're able to include our permission or out of province forms, and we're even able to gather volunteers for it.
all within just one form and all that you can set up fairly quickly. And then I'll show you what this looks like from the parent side. We can save, which just saves the event itself, or you can save and notify. And that will actually send an email notification out to all the parents that have agreed to receive the information from you digitally. Now, we talked about the permission forms. I just want to show you quickly what that looks like.
Again, we tend to set these up for you, but I'll just drive in so you can see a little bit of what that looks like. Anything you see with one of these percentage signs is a wild card. So this is dynamic information. It grabs it from that form that we just look like. This would be all of the legal name, legal language that your board provided. And then again, we
We put into each one the parent's name, the student's name, we can put the event name, the event date, the school's, all of this to ensure that you don't have to recreate these forms for every event. They're dynamic, they'll grab the information from the system itself. All you have to do is select it from that dropdown, but the parents themselves see a very filled out form.
And then we keep a complete archive of all of the forms that have been signed. So for example, if we want to go and look at an event that we've had.
We can see all of the forms that the parents have created. And then what we usually recommend at the end of the year is that you export these so you have a redundant source of them. We'll just look at one very quickly here.
And what you have is a complete version. Apologies to our friends at the Winnipeg School Division that we'd set up this logo for. But you can see you have a complete signed form, a full standalone digital copy of everything that a parent signed, again for redundancy, and hopefully to eliminate that binder that you might have in the office with all of the paper.
We keep these current year plus one, and you have the ability to pull them up at any point in time and export all of them to whatever system that you might need.
So that's an event. I just want to very quickly touch on a product and what that looks like. So the event is really a field trip. A product is something much more like an e-commerce storefront. So you might be selling hot lunches, you might be selling sweatshirts or t-shirts. Really, there's an enormous amount of flexibility within this to set them up however you want.
I'm going to show you what a hot lunch may look like, just to give you a sense of the number of options that are available. You don't have to set them up this complicated. You can set them up very straightforward. But this is an example where we've had each week there's a different item, and the parents have a choice of a menu for each one.
And then even on each date, there's different items that have different prices. So you can see we've set this up as a multiple choice. On June 8th, the parent's going to go in and select their individual items. And I will show you this from the parent side as well. And we can see we have the ability to put in our actual cost and display cost on each option.
and still make sure that all of it gets assigned to the correct payment category as well. Another fun feature here is we can duplicate this event. So if we want to apply this to different months, you can really just make it once. You can duplicate the item and save yourself a ton of time in terms of the setup. If you've got a format that you really like, it's very easy to just duplicate this and make as many as you need.
You can also just deactivate it as soon as it's no longer valid. So you have the ability to sort of archive it, have it there for reference if you want to duplicate it in the future. And as soon as you deactivate it, it's no longer visible to the parents. One other quick item just before we jump over to the parent side is something we call forms. Now this is a very
open-ended item. It's basically allows you to create any question that you want, send it to the parents, and it's almost unlimited in what you can set up. I'll just give you a sense of how quick you can set up these forms. These don't have to be attached to any sort of cost items, so they can be used as surveys. They can be used for
responsible use policies or media release. And you can add any of these formats in very, very quickly. If we want to have a title, we can add that. If we want a full paragraph description, maybe we want to add a series of questions. They can be short answer, long answer, multiple choice. You can see that it's very, very easy to set this up in as many ways as you wanted to. It's almost unlimited and it's a very quick.
powerful way to build forms within the system. And I should mention all of this is included with the base product. So these are not different modules that you may have to purchase. These all are included with School Day in general.
And it just gives you an enormous amount of flexibility for different ways to use this. You can see some of our sample forms that we have set up, for example, responsible use, volunteer forms. There's really a huge number of uses that we've seen the schools apply to these forms. And again, it can be just things like, are they going to agree?
and you have those same wild cards available to make sure that it's dynamic and it's exactly specific to each parent that uses the system.
Now I could keep talking about all the functionality here. There's a lot within the system, but I do want to make sure we give you a sense of what the parent side looks like. So again, I've signed in as a parent here. You can see this is a slightly different setup. This is our mobile version that we're looking at. Now hopefully this is working on your screen, but you can see it changes as we change the size of the screen. So this will work on tablets, will work on phones, and it's responsive.
You don't have to use a sort of pinch and zoom type of interface. And then I want to give you a sense of how easy it is for the parent to fill out these forms and what it might look like. So this is a canoe trip that we have coming up. And you can see we have the ability for the parent to manage multiple students within the same dashboard.
So I don't need to set up different accounts for each student. I can add them all to my one parent account, and then I can take action on them all at the same time. In this case, I have two students. This one's already complete. You can see that they're attending the event and they've finished everything. This one has not yet completed their options. And this is an example of a form.
or sorry, of an event that has permission forms attached and has some optional items. So in this case, we're going on a canoe trip. Maybe I want to add a life jacket because I don't have my own to bring, and I'm going to rent a canoe paddle as well. You have the ability to create these products specifically tied to events so that users don't.
you know, have to go into a storefront and try to find them. They're presented directly to them once they actually click on the event. In this case, there's going to be a t-shirt that goes along with it. So you can choose the name for the t-shirt, pick a size.
And then we have our permission form. Now, you'll notice I could not check out until I saw the form. And you can see I showed you this one set up initially with all of the wild cards. This is what it looks like once those wild cards are actually completed for an individual parent. So I'm seeing my parents' name. I see the student's name. I see the specifics of the event that we're going to be attending.
And then I have all of the legal language that the board has made sure that I read.
I can click agree.
And now I've completed that form, and I have the ability to check out. Now, we are going to run a little bit tight on time, and I do want to show you a little bit of what we might do with the reconciliation. Once I've completed all of these items, I do have the ability to check out. Actually, we're going to add.
This.
Let's just call it a test. I'm not feeling too creative at the moment.
And you can see now that I've completed everything, I'm able to add this to the cart.
Now, I just briefly want to show you the options that we have. Like most cards, we want parents to be familiar with this type of item, so they can remove it, review everything before they check out. And then if I do check out, we're going to have some options for how we pay. So this is set up as a demo if they're going to pay with a credit card, but you can see I do have the option of paying for cash.
What this just gives you the opportunity at the school to do is if you have some parents that you know don't feel comfortable paying long line or are not able to pay online, you can give them the cash option. And then once I place this order at the school, I'll just see this as an open order and I just need to receive it. And what that means is even though I still am accepting cash,
I've still got all of the benefits of having all of the forms filled out digitally, and we've saved the paper. We've got all of those forms tied into one place. So even if you have those parents, because there may always be a few that aren't able to pay online, you can still encourage them to use the system and make sure that you get all the advantages of, again, the digitization of the forms.
and the income.
So I'm just going to jump back over to the admin side now and show you a little bit of what the information looks like in terms of the payment center. And then I want to give you a bit of a sample report just to talk about the reconciliation, and then we'll just leave some time for questions. So our payment history grabs everything that's happened.
in terms of the payments in real time. So the moment that a parent makes a payment, I have the ability to view it within my payment history. This includes right at the district level. If you want to drill down and see in real time when parents have paid, you have the ability to do that. And you'll also see we have an integrated refund. So right from the system, if I need to refund one of these purchases, I can.
I just need to click on that refund button. And we have controls here where you can only refund the total amount that was in that order. So we can't send, for example, more money back than was in the order. You can send partial amounts if you needed to, but it won't let you exceed what the amount of the order was, just really as a fraud control.
And that gives you a lot of control and power right from this dashboard. There's also ways that you can refund, let's say, a whole event at a time if you need to save time. If there's been a major cancellation, we certainly ran into this during COVID. We actually helped one district refund over $1,000,000 they'd accepted within just a few days because everything got cancelled, obviously, with
COVID restrictions. So it is an enormously powerful system to give you all of the choices that you have. And then just very, very quickly, you can see in the columns here, we report the date, the transaction, the order, the student, the parent, what they bought. And then in the background, we're also reporting the ledger, excuse me, that this purchase is associated to.
Just very, very quickly, the order is school days information. That's the who, the what, the where, the why. The transaction is what we pull from the payment provider. That allows us to batch this information and also gives us two completely redundant ways of tracking every payment that's happened within the system. So if we need to investigate, we always have two pieces of information with which we can do it.
And it makes sure that we have a very good understanding of everything that's happened within the system.
Now, you can create your own reports directly out of this. If I wanted to see all of the activity that we've had in May to date, for example, I can shrink exactly everything that I'm seeing here. We can see we only have 9 payments now. And then I'm able to generate a report directly from the system. You can see now the category and the account codes have been added. So this is a way to really make on-demand reports.
ports. Those of you familiar with online payments in batches know this isn't actually what hits your bank though. So just because it happened on this day, it may not actually hit your bank until a few days later. And that's where the reconciliation really comes in. Excuse me, is matching up the information on school day with whatever happened in your bank account.
Now, I showed you that slide initially that said we want to group these things and show you what they look like specifically to your bank. And if we're doing this as an automated report, I just want to give you a sense of what that looks like.
Now this is all mocked up data that I've created here, but it does give you a sense of all the information that we're pulling into the background. So this report is just one version that we've designed to show you, again, how would we line all of this up with the bank? So this is exactly what you would see in your bank statement for a given period. And this is assuming we're using a vendor
that deposits net. So they're actually extracting fees before they get to the bank, which if we don't help you with this, it may be a confusing amount of information. You're going to have this as your gross sales that you, let's say, pulled from the payment history, but this is the amount that actually got deposited in your bank. So what we're able to do in the background is connect to the payment provider, and we can pull in that information that we don't have within School Day. And that is.
What is the actual dollar amount that got settled? What is the date that it got settled on? And then what were the actual fees that got paid? We can then help you balance all of that information and either use something like this to manually put those line items into your accounting system. Let's say you're using something.
like the SparkRock Finance centralized ERP. These are basically journal entries that we can automate so that you know exactly what's happened, and these can get written directly into that program. So as I mentioned off the top, this might be our gross sales, but we're giving you the journal entries so that you can adjust. This is the revenue that you actually want to book.
because we've put some money aside for fees, and then we've got an actual amount of fees that we've collected so that we have a true asset balance for you. The other thing we can do with this type of report is if you want this in a very specific format, we can also create something like this. And we have a number of districts that are using almost exactly this type of format, either on a daily, a weekly, or a monthly basis.
We then create all of these entries in whatever format you need. So there's an enormous amount of freedom. We speak to some districts. This needs to be, for example, the item plus the account code, or it needs to be the student plus the name of the GL, whatever it may be to be imported into your system. These are also referred to sometimes as dimensions or account sets.
We'll make sure that this matches your system so that the upload is as easy as possible. So then we have our gross sales, we have the journal entry amount, we have a description, we have the ledger account associated. And again, we can balance these either to zero so that it's a true balancing into your account or in whatever way you need to balance the information.
This is something, you know, if this appears overwhelming, this is something we figure out with you during the pilot, and we really work backwards. What kind of reports do you need to generate? How can we get you the data in the easiest way? And we do have schools that really just load this information on a weekly or a monthly or even a daily basis, and then some that really just need this, and it's just a simple line item entry into the accounting program.
So to just wrap all of that up very quickly and then Ailey, I'll hand it back over to you for.
The final wrap up. But this is really now that life cycle that we looked at. So we loaded the ledger accounts. We created, let's say, a field trip. We tagged it with that specific information. The parents made a number of purchases. And then we split it into the correct accounts so that we can see what's going to the bank, what's going to our fee and revenue accounts. And then we can either export that
to our internal system internally, if you're using SparkRock Finance, or set it up in a format that allows it to very easily flow into your centralized ERP program. So I'm going to stop there. You can tell there's a fair bit that the program does. It's really a very powerful tool with a number of different items.
We didn't get a chance, for example, to talk about some of the other admin items, the communications. We have a completely integrated parent-teacher interview booker, for example. There's really an enormous amount that you can do. We want to be between you and the parents, really collecting any of the data or any of the funds that you need to, and making sure you can balance all of that centrally.
So I'll stop there. I'll hand it back to Ailey. Please do ask questions. And again, if you'd like more detailed information about any of the sections, we're happy to set up a demo with more detail. Haley.
I'll stop sharing my screen; you can take it over, perfect.

Eilidh Lindsay-Sinclair 41:58
Awesome. Thanks so much, David. That was a wonderful walkthrough. We have a few minutes left for questions. So if you have any, please add them to the chat or via the Q&A function now. And I know we got a couple questions in advance. So David, I might kick it off with one we got from someone looking for more information on
Users of the board level, can they create new permission forms directly?

David Parisi 42:24
So they can. Your users at the board level can create a bunch of things throughout the year, whether that's a new permission form that they want to push out to all the schools, a new standard form. They can create files that they can post to parents or to even teachers. Let's say there's been an update to something that teachers need to know. And then they can also do announcements as well, either to the entire district, maybe there's been a cancellation or an event that needs to go out to everybody.
So there's a lot of tools that the districts have centrally. We're really trying to improve your ability at the central level to oversee either the financial information or this sort of regulatory administrative information.

Eilidh Lindsay-Sinclair 43:02
Awesome. And then another question, how does School Day manage bank deposits?

David Parisi 43:08
Excellent, you're right. So we didn't have a chance to touch on that. So as I mentioned, the individual transactions you receive online are going to be batched over 24 hours, and that's going to be deposited in your bank to give you one total. Very much the same way with cash. If you're receiving cash over a number of days, you're not going to deposit each order.
you're going to bundle that together and make one deposit. And we do have a feature that allows you to pull in received orders in cash, combine them into one deposit slip. We can even add in your banking information if you need to have it for, let's say, an armored car pickup. You could print it out and put it in the bag. It also has some controls to make sure that you can't just, let's say, make things up.
So you don't just say I've got $500 cash, you actually pull it from received orders. And that ensures when we're balancing that we have a gross total that's actually going to the bank, but also all that back endledger information that matches to that total. And it's a very easy feature to use within the system.

Eilidh Lindsay-Sinclair 44:06
Awesome. And I think with that, we're exactly at time. So I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who joined us today. And please reach out either to David directly or visit us at partnershipsnexusmarketingcom. Here to answer more questions offline for sure. So thank you again for joining and we hope everyone has a wonderful day.
Also, thanks, David. Thanks, David, for the walkthrough.

David Parisi 44:24
Thank you for your time, everyone. Thank you.
This.
Thank you.

Eilidh Lindsay-Sinclair 44:29
Thanks, everyone.

David Parisi 44:30
Bye.

Paula Wilhelm 44:30
Thank you. Bye now.