Name: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud’s K-12 Education Management Portfolio
Uploaded: 2025-11-20T19:00:11.587Z
Duration: 1 h 30 min 44 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud’s K-12 Education Management Portfolio

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud’s K-12 Education Management Portfolio": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our product update briefing for November. If you can believe that, we're bringing 2025 to a close. We're gonna start this update briefing off a little different. Sudip Datta, who's our chief product officer, wanted to be on the pub to give you guys a little insight into what we got going on, but he couldn't make it today. So we're gonna have him say a brief some brief words via recording. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the product update briefing for our education portfolio. I'm Sudip Jatta, Blackboard's chief product officer. I'm sorry I can't be there live today because there are several sessions playing concurrently. But I wanted to kick things off because I understand how important this session is for you. I am excited for my team to share the incredible innovation we have planned to help our k 12 independent schools. At Blackboard, our mission is to empower educational institutions to advance their goals through purpose built solutions. Today's session is all about how we are continuing to deliver on that promise. K twelve education is evolving rapidly, especially as artificial intelligence promises to disrupt how students learn in the classroom. We know schools need technology that simplifies operations, enhances family engagement, and drives student success. Our vision remains clear, a connected, intelligent platform that supports the entire student life cycle from applicant to alumni. In today's briefing, you will see how we are better aligning financial aid workflows across the admissions process, strengthening integrations across our total school solution with new common records engine, and delivering a more intelligent SIS with AI driven tools like Blackboard chat. AI is not just another technology buzzword for us. We want to leverage the technology as a fabric for the next generation of school operations. The updates we will be sharing aren't just features. They're designed to reduce complexity for administrators, create a seamless experience for families, and help schools focus on what matters most, educating the next generation of leaders. My product team has listened to your feedback, and today, you will see enhancements that reflect your priorities. With that, let's dive into the details. I'll hand it over to our product team to walk you through what's new and what's next. Thanks for that. Hope you guys have found that helpful and informational set context. I'm Paul Fitch. I'm gonna get us started here. A little bit about me. Been with Blackbaud about twenty years, but not contiguous twenty years. I am a a boomerang, and I'm in the Charleston area and I must be near water. Here's our agenda for today. I'm gonna start us off with some housekeeping and general introductions, then we're gonna bring up individual speakers to cover each one of these areas. You have an opportunity to hear from the the the expert of each one of these areas. So as you follow along, you notice that we will bring different speakers to the stage. Just some general housekeeping. The the punch line here is there's a a few things that you need to be aware of. One, if you have any technical difficulties, we find that refreshing the browser solves almost all of them. You are gonna get a recording. That's a common question. And then probably the most important thing is if you have questions, we wanna hear them. However, we're gonna move fast. There's gonna be a lot of different speakers. So when you ask your questions, please provide as much context as you can so that we are able to answer your questions more efficiently. Hey. So why are we here? We're here to talk about our essential software for taste take for k 12 schools. From like Sandeep said, from our applicant to alumni, Blackbaud's goal is to be a single vendor to solve problems around our customer's campus and around the student life cycle. The key takeaway is that our core vision is to provide a connected total school solution from admissions enrollment all the way through fundraising advancement. Lastly, we aim to be open API first total solution with a broad partner network for added value. These are some of our overall strategic themes that we use to guide our priorities and focus within each product. It's all geared around digital transformation at your school. Keep an eye for these icons as we showcase the content. They will indicate outcomes we're trying to help you achieve through the delivery of that capability or feature. But don't take our word for it. The Emma Willard school school is seeing value of the total school solution, gaining efficiencies, leveraging the technology to build collaboration across campus, and driving their mission of empowering women and building lifelong learners. If you haven't seen this video, it's take a look. It's really impactful. Speaking of the total school solution, there's other product up update briefings going on for other parts of the total school solution, most notably Razor's Edge and Financial Edge. Make sure that your team is signed up for that or that you're signed up for it. Even if you can't attend, you'll get the recording for those as well. If you haven't heard, the user conference is back. The the call for for speakers is open, and we'd love to get your proposals for things that you want to showcase. And then it's also a good time to take advantage of that early bird registration and save a little money. If you haven't heard, in other news, we are thrilled to announce the acquisition of School BI. The strategic addition is specifically designed to help educational institutions fully leverage the potential of their data even when it exists across multiple silos on campus. One of the standout capabilities that we will deliver with this is the support for multischool and multisite reporting. This functionality allows for comprehensive roll up recording across different databases to provide insights across entities. So we won't cover a lot of this today, but more to come, and we're pretty excited about this acquisition. As Suneet mentioned, we talked about our common records engine. So this is what's gonna keep our education management and Raiser's Edge fundraising data in sync is is on the cusp of an early doctor. We're marching towards general availability, and there's a new Blackboard University class that's all about preparing your data so you can get the most value out of this when you are ready. Blackbaud knows that security is a top priority for you and your organizations. That's why we're excited to introduce the Blackbaud trust center. It's your new centralized hub for all things related to Blackbaud security designed to make your security reviews easier. Your Blackbaud ID will let you access to things like frequently asked questions about security, audit reports like SOC and PCI, as well as security related white papers. We are also pleased to announce the 2026 launch of the AI Coalition for Social Impact. It's an initiative uniting organizations and innovators committed to advancing ethical AI solutions and includes strong education representation from ATLAS. Our inaugural program is a complimentary certification designed to equip participants with essential AI skills. So pretty cool stuff there. Now if you made it to bbcon, you walked away with themes that you'll see up here in today's presentation. Sadiq mentioned a number of them, but connected systems that you'll see represented in experiences like our trauma records engine as well as enrollment contracts, intelligent action represented by our work to help identify populations of students that may need attention, and, of course, artificial intelligence. You'll see time saving tools for teachers as well as a new way of interacting with your data via chat experience. Now if you couldn't join us at DBcon, check out all the virtual virtual content that's available, which includes an education luminary session with a panel of industry rock stars talking about AI considerations specific to educational institutions. Now slides are designed to help keep you oriented in what we're talking about. There's stickers placed on them. You notice there's one in the upper right hand corner that's gonna indicate the product or area. Down in the bottom left, there's what value we believe you're gonna get out of this particular capability. There's regional availability, so you'll notice that some things may only be a bit be available in The US, for example, so be most applicable in our tuition and financial aid sections. Is it available now or a work in progress is probably the most important one. So are all of our speakers are gonna start showcasing things that you can take advantage of now and then go into things that are next. If you're ever wondering if it's now or next, use that sticker to guide you. And then last but not least is this feature coming from an idea bank. We love your ideas. Keep them coming. Speaking of ideas, we're very competitive here in product management, and we try to close out more ideas, the current year than we did in last. And here is our scorecard, and we are ahead of 2024. We're pretty proud of that. We hope you guys are seeing your votes come to life. Please keep them coming. And last but not least, it wouldn't be an update briefing without a safe harbor statement. Remember, we're going to be talking about the future. There we're gonna be talking about things that we haven't delivered yet. Now we have them in our plans, and we're gonna do our best efforts to bring them to market, but there are some instances when plans change. That's most important. You are in this update briefing as a prospect. Please make sure you're making any purchase decisions based on what's available now versus what's coming next. And if you ever can't remember what we're talking about, remember that sticker at your bottom right hand corner will give you an indication. And with that, we're gonna bring our first rock star to the stage and talk we'll talk about what's going on in the land of core. Take it away, Jesse. Thanks, Paul. Hey, everyone. My name is Jessie Walters, and I'm the product manager for Core in education management. I've been with Blackbaud for seven years now, but I implemented education management at a k 12 school in Oklahoma where I lived at the time over ten years ago. First, for core, let's talk about things that were recently released. The Blackbaud ID team made several changes in the last few months. The first of those that I'll that we I wanted to show you is two new authentication types. Users can now sign in using sign in with Microsoft or sign in with Facebook, which makes it easier for them to sign in with the identity they use in other places online. But the good news is that you can configure your sign in options. You can choose which ones show up on your sign in page and in what order. So admins can go up to the admin area, settings, and branding to configure that sort order and to choose which of those options is gonna show up. But the good news is that our smart redirect logic is going to make those BBIDs work even if their existing authentication method is one of the ones that you've chosen to hide. I also wanted to call out some minor enhancements that we released in core in education management to help you manage your users. Login history now shows the reason for changes whenever a Blackbaud ID is updated or disconnected by Blackbaud. We are showing the last login date now on the Blackbaud Bot ID authentication page register tab so you can keep an eye on any users who might be coming, due for inactivation due to inactivity. You can also enable and disable users in bulk from all tabs of that Blackbaud ID authentication page. So if you see that you have students or if you have a group of parents who you need to make sure have active accounts as you head into contract season or in the back to school season, you can make sure that they are all in the correct account status. And we've also made the Blackbaud ID authentication list sticky so that as you're as you're going through that list, configuring your settings, navigate a way to make an update somewhere, when you come back, all of those settings will remain on that page. Across education management, we are working to update all of our oldest pages, which we call podium, by the 2028. So one of the things that the team recently updated is the mail merge area. Benefits of this include some renamed tabs for clarity, so, you know, what you're actually looking at on each of those tabs of the mail merge experience. It's gonna be more consistent because we're using our more modern interface for interacting with these tools. And with the update, it has made it possible to filter and sort even though there were no other real changes to functionality. But this page now has, a more attractive and consistent look and feel. We also redesigned the buildings area. Before, it was difficult to see all of the info in, in a single page, and the buildings and rooms experience was different in different areas of the app. So now with the redesign, you have a single modernized experience regardless of where you're managing buildings and rooms. You can now search for buildings or rooms all from a single page without having to drill all the way into each of them, and it's now possible to export all of the information for your buildings and rooms, including the custom fields. Perhaps the most exciting of everything that I'll share today is the new view as student capability that was recently released by the core team. What we were hearing over and over again is that you need to be able to see what the students can see. Your teachers need to be able to see what students can see. So with view as student, it works pretty much like view only impersonation, but specifically of students. View as is gonna be available anywhere that your teachers can see the contact card, whether they are looking them up from the roster, if they get there from the directory, or if there's someone who has access to the academic or core profile, the view as button will show up there under the profile header. And then when they enter view as student, the impersonation banner is updated to show that you're viewing as that user and that no changes will be saved in this experience. The US student is available for teachers to see students who are enrolled in their classes. It's available for advisers to see advisees who are enrolled in their advisory group sections, and it's available for system admins to see all students who are in the, assigned school level, granted as part of that system admin access filter. By default, the all of these view as tasks were disabled by default, so you'll wanna go into the tasks list to find those tasks and roles that you'll need to review to actually turn this on, or you can join me, in a webinar on December 3. The registration link will be posted in core in the next few days, so you'll be be able to register for that. If you've configured it and you're wondering why is the button showing up for user a or why isn't the button showing up for user b, we have an access checker that is also available where you can go and select the viewer you want to investigate and the student that they might be trying to view and check access to determine, does view as work for this person? And you can see all of the details on that page that explain why or why not rather than having to go in all of the places throughout the system to check all of your settings to confirm what is or is not there. Join me at the webinar. We're gonna go all the way into the details for this. The core team also recently released phone number formatting. Actually, Tuesday, we released phone number formatting. So now under core users, user profile settings, there is a new phone number format that you can enable, and you can choose which format you prefer your phone numbers to be in, whether it's using parentheses, hyphens, periods. You select the phone formatting preference. And then anytime that a phone number is edited on a contact card, whether it's an existing phone number or if it's a new phone number, upon save, that phone number will be formatted according to your chosen preference. Coming soon, we will also be applying your chosen formatting to phone numbers that are entered through data imports, if they come in through the API, if they're entered in various forms throughout the system, but that work is in progress and not available quite yet. But editing of phone numbers on the contact card is available now as of Tuesday. Just make sure you go into core to enable that setting to turn it on for your community. Next, let's talk about things that are coming soon in the land of core. First up, let's talk about the reports redesign. As I said, we're trying to get all of our oldest pages on the newest style, and so reports is one of the areas that the team is currently working on today. In the new list of reports, it combines reports and the reports admin experience so that if you're an admin, you are able to manage role access, user access, find any of the embedded reports all from a single list. But this list is still going to respect the access that each of your users has. So they're only gonna see the reports and the, settings that are available for them. This list is going to be released first. And then soon after that, we are also going to add descriptions for each of those reports so that as you're looking through the system, you know what that report is gonna contain without having to go all the way into the report and run it to find out. And then we are also going to give you a notes field where you can edit some of notes to yourself to remind you when, when you run this report or for which process the report is helpful. The list of basic and advanced list is also getting a similar update so that you'll have your standard list for running all of your, your list and basic and advanced list. And just like with the reports experience, with the new list of basic and advanced list, you'll be able to as a a list admin, you'll be able to manage role access and user access from a single list. You'll be able to view lists that were created by other users if you're a list admin. All of the list will be available in a single place rather than having two tabs of of a list of lists. We are also making it possible to export your list of lists, and we will be working to make it possible to delete lists in both as well, making it possible making it easier to manage all of your lists more easily. The core team is also working to support inclusion, so that you can enter your students' names exactly as they should be represented with all the right characters. So coming soon, we will support world language characters in all of the name fields that you find on the contact card. And then as Sudeep mentioned in the beginning, we are working to bring Blackbaud AI chat into education management as well. AI allows you to engage your data using natural language. And in education management specifically, what that means is that with AI chat, you'll be able to retrieve some basic user information like like from their contact card. You'll be able to create list more easily. You'll be able to find settings or find pages that you don't have to visit very often and may have forgotten where they are. You'll be able to make data comparisons like compare access of user a to the access of user b so that whenever you're doing onboarding and offboarding activities, you can make sure that people have the right kinds of access. And then, additionally, with AI chat, you have seamless access to your data regardless of where you are. So if you're in the process of building an advanced list, you don't have to leave that advanced list just to go pull up a phone number or just to check the attendance for a student. So, for example, in the student information system or regardless of where you are in in the system, you could ask AI chat to give you a summary of a student's conduct or of a student's attendance. And then if you find that something isn't there, you could say, please enter this absence or please enter this infraction for a student, and it can take care of that for you on that page without ever having to leave the screen, streamlining your administrative tasks so that you can focus on students. And then the other major project that the team is currently working on is in the realm of reporting. In general, you need more from your data, and it needs to be easier to get your data from the system. And so in partnership with data with Databricks and with Microsoft Fabric, specifically Power BI, we are working to make your data available all in a single place so that you don't have to hunt and peck for your data in various reporting tools. We'll make it possible to engage AI to answer quest questions more quickly with your data. We will make it possible to build advanced queries to tell a story with visual reports, and we will are working to reduce latency that so that your dashboards are up to date. With that, I will turn it over to Jacqueline Kocia and Mike Morissette to talk about the student information system and learning management system. Thanks, Jesse. Hi, everyone. I am Jacqueline Kosha. I'm the product manager for the student information system. I've been with Blackbaud for over twelve years working solely on our education products. And then joining me today to walk through the student information and learning management updates is Mike. Hi, everyone. My name is Mike Morissette. I am also one of the product managers here at Blackbaud working on the education management suite of products. Been with the company now for about ten years. And prior to coming to Blackbaud, I was a high school French teacher and swim coach. So that's a little bit about me. Now I'll hand it back over to Jacqueline to talk through some of the student information items that we have coming up. Perfect. So let's take a look at our features that are available now for the student information system. So as you can see, we've been really continuing our focus on the journey to modernize school's experiences and make it more efficient to do your work. So let's dive in. So first up is our official notes page refresh. We started with the manage official notes experience, and this replaced a page that was previously called approve official notes In an effort in an effort to provide additional ease in reporting and review, the main page has been updated to a list, making it easier to review all of your official notes. And as a bonus, we added the ability to view and manage draft notes, whereas previously, there was not a simple way to clean those up as needed. And additionally, the approval process received a facelift with a real focus on reducing the clicks and time spent on those approvals. From there, we continue to refresh in the official notes area with updates to the official notes types, official notes monitoring teams, and official notes notifications pages. Each of these brings the experience in line with other modern user experiences using lists and common set patterns, so you have a familiar experience when updating any of the setup information. And then, as for you, other areas in the system, in scheduling, we modernized and simplified the enroll group process. Scheduling and group managers can enroll groups of users based on various criteria in one or multiple group sections. And then with this update, all existing functionality was retained from the old page, but, of course, we added some new functionality as well to make enrolling groups easier. So with this update, you are now able to paste a list of students to be enrolled, making it easier to enroll unrelated groups of students or to work with data from outside the system. And then our next update is to our transcripts. One of the biggest pain points we've heard with the builders is getting courses from different school levels to display on the same transcript. Good example here is if a student in eighth grade takes a course in the upper school, and that should count towards their upper school graduation and transcript. Previously, there was no simple way to display that. Now with this update, you are able to control whether transcripts display information from multiple school levels and even allows controls over which courses from the different school levels display. So no more manually recording grades or creating placeholder classes just to get that information to display on a transcript. Over to you, Mike. Yes. Thank you. One other page that we recently updated to Sky UX was the test setup page. This can be accessed in the grading setup area, and all the functionality that existed with test previously also exists with this new updated SkyList. Just makes finding tests in this list a little bit easier and, quicker to create tests. So, more to come in some Sky UX updates that we have. I wanna switch gears and talk a little bit about learning profiles. Now we're gonna talk through two experiences that recently were updated to Sky UX, the first of which is the learning profiles list. This was updated just in the past week, actually. And as part of this particular update, we did not update the actual template builder. However, there is an enhancement coming to this particular screen in the near future, where you all will be able to select whether you add a new learning profile as either a template, meaning that you continue using our template builder, or you can create learning profiles that allow you to upload a file onto a student record to act as the learning profile itself. It would then be housed within the same security structure that the templates are housed in and present itself in the exact same way that learning profiles using the template structure, present themselves to faculty. So by large, faculty would see no difference. Just when they click on the link to the learning profile, a file would download rather than the template being generated. That file capability, will retain all of the same sharing functionality that the template capability has. And, again, that is slated to come later on. So be on the lookout in our what's new once that feature is ready to be released. Additionally, the approval process for learning profiles is going to be getting, a Sky UX overhaul. This particular update is actually scheduled for December 3, so you may not see it in your database just yet, but it is coming in the very, very near future. And this particular page is getting a complete Sky UX overhaul. So you can see on the left hand side, you'll be able to select between individual students and their learning plans that need approval. And then you, as a learning profile manager, will be able to go into the right hand pane and make any corrections or edits for the learning profile prior to approval. Additionally, with this particular update, we are enhancing the security around the approval process. Currently, you can impersonate a learning profile manager and go in and mark learning profiles as approved or denied. In the future, however, you will not be able to impersonate a learning profile manager. There's a lot of sensitive information that can exist on a learning profile. And because of that, we are limiting the ability to impersonate a user and see this particular screen. So instead, you will need to be logged in as a learning profile manager in the future to access the approval process. Now we also have a good number of updates coming to the student information system. We'll talk through things like attendance, grading, student success insights, as well as internal notes. First, I wanna talk through a couple of updates that are coming regarding the grading module. The first one is a particular page that we're really excited to get out of Podium and into Sky UX, and that's the enter grades like class screen. This particular page gets used very heavily throughout the year. So we know that updating the Cisco, is really going to alleviate a lot of pain points that you will have when managing this particular screen. It's very click heavy right now in Podium, and we really wanna alleviate a lot of those clicks for you all. Additionally, we will be leveraging the exact same grade entry experience that faculty use when they are entering and end of term grades. So all of the enhancements and updates, like being able to see previous grades, in the grid format, for example, will be possible in end of grades by class, just like it is when faculty are entering in those end of term grades. One other big update that we have is coming for grading, and we are dubbing it the grading hub. Think of this as a one stop shop for you as grading managers to go and manage and, create your various grading settings. Now this particular project will be coming in several phases. The first phase is scheduled for quarter one of the next calendar year, and that will give you all the ability to manage grade plans in bulk. So being able to update things like grade plan, start and end dates for grading, as well as the review dates. And also being able to update and add formulas on a grade plan by grade plan basis in bulk will all be included within phase one. Within later phases of the Grading Hub, we plan on updating things like the rollover process for grading as well as giving you all a guided experience that better explains how the various grading settings relate to one another when you're going through and updating or changing those for the first time. As part of this update, we'll also be going through and updating several of the grading related settings. So things like grade plan groups, grade plan grades, and grade plans will be receiving a naming overhaul. Instead, they'll be known as grade groups, marking periods, and grade columns. Additionally, we'll be changing the naming convention of standard and assessment, and we'll be converting those to traditional grades and skill based grades accordingly. So more to come on these naming updates. Be on the lookout. We'll have a couple of blog posts and some webinars once the speaker is ready to go live. And I'll pass it back over to Jack. Great. So helping you automate workflows where appropriate and improve communication with your students, parents, and staff is really key to this next feature. We are revamping what is currently known as attendance rules within our conduct area. This will now be known as attendance thresholds and truly represents the whole of what needs to be communicated when students reach certain attendance points. Rather than being tied solely to conduct infractions, these attendance thresholds will be able to do much more, such as sending notifications to parents or staff. You will still have the ability to assign infractions, though, if needed. Two additional improvements that I want to call out. There will be expanded options for what constitutes the threshold, such as calculating thresholds by class, and, finally, the ability to control when processing occurs each day, allowing for tenants to be updated and verified before these thresholds are calculated. This really reduces time and effort on the other side of thresholds as well. Look for this functionality, during 2026. And then next, we have another feature we plan to deliver during the first quarter next year. We are bringing internal notes to the student information system's student profiles. Official notes are currently the catchall for notes on the student records within SIS. This project begins our journey at providing clear areas to document the various information needed for students. These notes will exist only for admin users, so no worries about information being sent to students, parents, or faculty. So keep an eye out for this also in quarter one. And then finally, I'm thrilled to share some more about our final student information systems project, Student Success Insights. This project was formerly known as At Risk Students, so hopefully you've heard about us heard about us speak at this before. This feature will allow you to define calculations to locate students who are at risk that may be failing class, completing the year, or graduating. Data points from across the SIS and LMS will initially be available to choose from when creating those calculations. With this feature, you'll be able to locate and focus on the students who need the most support. So save time on the admin side to instead focus that time on those students. This feature will provide lots of transparency and clarity into the data that factored into the student status, ensuring that you're able to make educated decisions about the next steps for each individual student. We're in the process of our our client technical preview now with plans to go to an early adopter program in the 2026. Back to you, Mike, for the updates in learning management. Yes. So a couple of items that we wanna chat through regarding the learning management system that are available now are pertaining to athletics and the end of term grade entry experience. So first, I won't spend a lot of time here. Just know that a lot of our athletic pages that were previously on Podium have since made the transition over to Sky UX. So all of those innate baked in functionality enhancements that come with moving over to Sky UX has since been leveraged for these various new pages. So if you wanna check these out, by all means, here is the full list of the pages that we moved over, and more will be coming in the future. Additionally, there are some minor enhancements that were recently released to the end term grade entry experience that I wanna make sure that you all are aware of. One of them has to do with teachers that are entering in bulk grades for standard grade plan groups. What we heard is that oftentimes when teachers are grading pass fail, for example, the vast majority of the class may ultimately have a passing grade. And so teachers wanna be able to enter that value in in bulk. Previously, this was only possible if you were using an assessment grade plan group, but we leveraged that exact same functionality and added it to the standard grade plan groups as well. So if you have teachers that are evaluating students, and wanna do so in a bulk fashion, that is now possible regardless of which grading methodology your school is currently utilizing. Additionally, we also made an update to grade translations. You can now customize on a grade translation by grade translation basis whether the grade label or the abbreviation displays two teachers when they're entering in grades. This is particularly helpful for assessment grade plan groups because oftentimes, the grade label may be very long, whereas the abbreviation should be abbreviated. If you want to change that particular value, you can do so again by going into grades, grading setup, grade translations, and then adding into the desired grade translation and marking the grade label or abbreviation option for the new, setting that we've gone ahead and introduced. Now a couple of updates that are coming for the learning management system, and some of these are coming in the very near future, and some will be a little bit more long range. So we'll talk through things like lockdown browser, as well as some assignment updates and parent submitted attendance, and we'll also take a look at some AI features that we have. First, I'll pass it back over to Jacqueline to talk through parent submitted attendance. Thanks. So we are very near the release of this first upcoming learning management feature, our parent submitted attendance. So managing parent emails and phone calls about attendance can take a lot of time. With this feature, parents, with appropriate rights, will be able to submit attendance for their students directly through the portal. You will be able to control which attendance reasons parents have access to and be able to review and adjust all parents submitted attendance. We're currently in the middle of our early adopter program and have made a number of improvements based on the great feedback from our participants. We expect the parents' mode attendants to be generally available by the 2025. Back to you, Mike. Wonderful. The first enhancement and feature that I wanna talk through has to do with LockDown Browser, which is an integration to our online assessment tool. It prevents students from being able to access outside resources while in the test taking experience. This particular feature will be dubbed a premium add on. As such, it does come at an additional cost, and that cost will be $1,999 per year. Now this is not something that you need to reach out to us, sales, or another organization to make the purchase. Instead, this can be done within education management. When this feature goes live, you must first be a platform manager as well as an organization admin in order to access the purchase screen. From here, you can go ahead and add it directly to your existing contract. It will amend itself and amend itself to your existing payment plan as well. Additionally, with this particular feature, we will be introducing a thirty day trial. So you can trial the feature prior to making any kind of purchasing decisions. Again, more to come on this in the near future. We are currently aiming to have this released before the end of the calendar year. So be on the lookout in our what's new and various other communications for when this feature is ready for general availability. The next update that I wanna talk through that's also planned to come before the end of the calendar year is our update to our assignment, experience for faculty. Both the creation of assignments and the grading of assignments, are experiencing an overhaul. Now with these two experiences, we really wanted to streamline the user interaction. There were a lot of clicks, a lot of scrolling that happened in both of these experiences. And by and large, both of the current experiences, were one of the areas where we received the most feedback from teachers. So in light of that, we've gone ahead and done a complete overhaul of both of these. With the assignment creation feature in particular, we are leveraging some of the information in your student information system, such as your schedule and connecting that to the due dates and times via relative selections. This means that your teachers don't necessarily have to know what time their next period starts. Oftentimes, this can be troubling in the event that your school, operates with a rotating schedule, for example. Instead, they can use the relative due date and time, and we do the heavy lifting for them. Additionally, we increase the number of preferences that teachers can set on these screens. That way, they can go ahead, set the preference, and every time that they go to create an assignment, that preference is adhered to, thus saving them some additional clicks. When it comes to the grading experience, this has also, received an overhaul. With this particular experience, we really wanted to make the student submitted work front and center while making sure that the teacher had an ergonomic workflow, while they were grading the student work. So with this particular update, it was really important to us to make sure that the teacher could see what the student submitted while being able to grade and write comments simultaneously. So that was the spirit of this particular update. With both of these updates for both the grading and the creation, we, again, are planning on having these released before the end of the year. But I will note that this will be an opt in experience, meaning that you as a platform manager will have to go into core and enable the particular feature. We do this because we recognize that introducing change, especially to faculty and students, can sometimes be very challenging in the middle of the year. So we give you all the chance to learn about the future, via webinars and what have you ahead of time, and then ultimately, you can turn it on when your institution is ready. Now I will note that we will be sunsetting both the current creation experience and grading experience for assignments in July 2026. So you'll have a little bit of time to, prep for this change before we we ultimately deprecate those older experiences. Finally, I wanna talk through two AI features, the first of which we're dubbing feedback generation. This particular, AI feature really is being created to help teachers get started with creating feedback and delivering even more feedback than what was previously possible. We all know that teachers oftentimes take in what are called completion grades. So they're creating an assignment, the student's turning something in, but the teacher may not necessarily have time to give feedback on that particular item. With this particular update, we're looking to allow the teacher to give some of that cognitive, load to the AI to allow them to give students even more feedback than what was previously possible. Now with this feature, we really wanted to make sure that it was easy and intuitive for teachers. So instead of giving them just a a prompt, to enter into, we really wanted to give them a form. That way, they could go ahead, select things like tone, style, overall response length, what language they want the feedback in. That way, they don't have to necessarily know how to use AI, in order to leverage this particular feature. Now throughout this entire experience, the teacher has 100% control over what ultimately is presented to the student. Just because the tool creates something doesn't necessarily mean that the teacher has to use it. They can go in, edit, use only a piece of it if they choose to, use none of it if they choose to. Ultimately, it's a tool that they have at their disposal and that they have complete control over. In addition to assignments, we're wanting to introduce this into things like discussions, assessments, as well as end of term grades. So more to come on this in the future. The last AI related, update that we have for the learning management system, is a feature that's a little bit further out than some of the other items that we've talked through. This is the assignment study assistant, and the idea here is that the teacher will be able to load materials into an AI study assistant that students could then leverage while they are working through their various assignments. A teacher might insert things like presentations, lesson plans, maybe a book or an excerpt from a particular short story and tell the tool exactly what it is that it should be focusing on with the student. Now if the student is working at home, they're not able to ask a question to their parent, or the teacher is unavailable at that moment in time, they can rely on the chatbot to help them through whatever problem it is that they're focusing on. While we're developing this, we do not want the chatbot to ultimately give answers to students. A lot of this is centered around the idea of the chat experience guiding the student to an answer and helping the student ultimately learn how to figure out a problem for themselves. Again, more to come on this particular feature, but we're excited to announce it and start playing around with this particular idea in the future. So more to come. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and pass it over to Steven Boyle to chat through some of his upcoming projects. Thank you. Like I said, I'm Stephen Boyle. I have, I'm in my thirtieth year here at Blackbaud, so I've got a number of topics to go over, so let's get started. For our school website system and communications area, while we continue to support and maintain school website, we are focusing our efforts on the communication tool, this one, dedicated to push pages. There are a couple of goals we have for this area. One, we wanna maintain the functionality that's that's in use today, and we also wanna quickly deliver a more modern UI and take some of that, Sky UX benefit that you've seen in other areas of the product, specifically around the filtering and sorting that you can do with lists. And then meanwhile, we wanna, do some research and discovery, with existing ideas and new and new input gathered from clients to determine what the tool should be for the future. This is will be a a ongoing work for 2026. Moving on to our, partner team and integrations, we got a couple areas that we're focusing on, more data, in our APIs as well as more tools for our partners to use. Starting out with the data that is now available, for instance, our partner Yubick now has, access to, and all our partners have access to our content area so that you can communicate more information, more pertinent information to your school community as well as a a broad access to, admissions data around candidate, and inquiry data so that you can even, introduce records from a partner system into your enrollment management system. Long time coming, and we were happy to announce that our, one roster integration, now supports Schoology and Google Classroom. These both handle, output to these systems in terms of rostering and class generation as well as returning grades back into Blackbaud so that you can maintain the workflows for your parents and students, that fit your situation. These are available now and, are self serve. You can go into, into core today, into core integration settings and integrations, and go set up a new one roster connection to Google Classroom, taking the credentials there into your Google Classroom environment and connecting your systems, and you should be able to get started right away. Some new tools that our partners have at their disposal now, start with talking about Sky add ins. Now these are, existing, features that the Raises Edge and the Financial Edge, teams have had access to for a while, and we're bringing them to the education we're bringing them to the education. The first place that you'll see this light up is in the few communications page for a user. There's the ability to to create another add in as a tab so that if you have a communication partner, say Bright Arrow or Ruvna, their communication logs can be presented in the same place as our internal communication logs. So you have a one stop shop for the, connections you have with that that user and that family. We'll be working more on other areas to surface partner information in the future as well. Some Sky API data enhancements that we have now, we've got improved efficiency and the ability to get roster data for classes and activities and advisories, in one call, getting all those class rosters at once. Some improved efficiency and fewer calls in your systems, for both partners and clients. Approved attendance tracking, meaning, that partners and and, clients can now indicate that they can go back and indicate that a class meeting has taken attendance. And this is important if you want to generate that attendance, present information for, outside reporting, for instance. Some other information is access to course requests as well as access to the custom fields on our courses and and classes. That last one's important because there are a lot a lot of times, special values that outside reporting requires for a course or class. Now you can get that information and provide it to your state reporting, for instance, if you've got a system that's, doing that for you. Moving on to what's next in this area, we continue to build out the new the tools, and, and capabilities for our partners as well as the common records engine. So some of the new tools that we'll be lighting up here in the very near future is a new API. Our education core API will be making an appearance, and some of the first elements that will be provided through that API is an improved set of list endpoints. They'll be able to deliver advanced lists all in one call. They'll deliver them in a file that you can download, and it can come with a predetermined format such as CSV or JSON. Talk more about that in the future, as well as the ability to do user searches to prevent creating duplicates through API and the ability to connect your BBID to your users as well as disconnect if you're offboarding. Some of the other work that we're doing is continued work on add ins and, as well as webhooks and file upload attachments or file attachments as uploads. So for Sky add ins, some of the areas that we'll be adding, allowing partners to surface their own information is on the enrollment management home page on the, core contact card as well as the academics contact card and conduct card, tab. The partners that have area that have information in for those systems, would now be able to present their data within the Blackbaud, user interface. Some for instances in this area is UBIT could surface statistics data for visitors to your website on your, enrollment management. They you can, on the conduct card, for instance, surface, information from your wellness system if you've got a counselor or wellness product that you are partnered with. Information from that system could also be surfaced while you're looking at that, student's conduct information. Lots more in this area, so we, we'll be expanding these add ins as we go. Webhooks is another tool, for helping partners and client processes be more responsive to events happening in the in the SIS and in the education system at large. Events that can trigger, a notification out to your partner, Initially, we'll include the ability to see user changes to the profile. So if there's an address or a phone change, you can, get a notification that you need to update your external systems. And future ones will include, contract events such as, a contract being returned or a contract being processed as well as checklist changes such as a a candidate checklist step was completed. This is another area where we'll continue to work and provide, more events for, tighter integrations in the workflows that flow between your system and, or the Blackbaud system and outside partners. File uploads is another area where we continue to add capabilities. Currently, you can upload, test score PDFs, for instance, for your entrance exams as well as file photos, profile photos for, onboarding students and faculty automatically. Some upcoming areas are learning plans. As Mike was talking about earlier, there's the ability the the ability to upload an existing learning plan to a learning profile from an outside system. So if you have that wellness counseling, service that where you concentrate that work, their end product can be then automatically added to, the education system so that it only that information surfaces to the teachers and and and staff in the education product that need to see it. Those list endpoints I was talking about have, some improved capabilities. The intent here is to allow our partners and our consultants, especially, and clients to have a more streamlined flow, for attaching to outside systems, including the power automate Power BI, platform. The some additional and, long awaited, capabilities that we'll be adding to this is the ability to deliver Skylist details as well. So, once these endpoints are delivered and ready, you'll not only be able to get advanced lists all in one, call, but we'll be adding Skylist capabilities as we go as well. The common records engine, last but not least, for the integration team, has, an ongoing live EAP with schools. And as we, progress through the EAP, we're adding additional, capabilities to the workflows as well as more controls in our settings to allow allow you more control over how your data syncs between systems as well as the final data elements that we plan to keep in sync across systems such as business and, the actual enrollment information from education. We'll be adding more schools here in the very near future, and that that feature should be ready for release in quarter two of next year. So look for that. Moving on to our edge our enrollment management system, the areas that we have ready for you to take advantage of now are some face lift and controls and, system process improvements. So let's talk through those. Our official notes is now work now has a Sky UX list version, that from the enrollment management home page, you can see out the office, the official note replies that you need to review, and you can get to the official notes, list and giving you the, the typical improvements you see with the the Sky UX enhancements of better filtering, better sorting, just easier view and and consistent, view of data across our system. Next is a process improvement. As inquiries come in and are completed by a family, you now have an ability to auto select checklist and admission staff to automatically be applied to a to a candidate created through the, inquiry process. So this is a a step in the process of automatically processing inquiries themselves, but this it is a a convenience for streamlining that process and reducing, the workflow. Additionally, in that same vein, the contracts process has seen some additional work. We have improved filtering to including the ability to filter your students down to the previous year's contract so that you can then assign that same contract to the upcoming year, if that's how you need to do it. And then we've also streamlined the ability to automatically generate contracts as you assign them if that is, something that you're able to do. This, dramatically improves the the ease of generating those contracts and the, intuitive areas to that show that capability. Some additional information that we've surfaced in the contracts list is the total you know, the the net tuition, total tuition, and financial aid information just giving you more, information in the place that you need to see it. And also available now on our student checklist, our reenrollment checklist area, the ability to assign to filter down, the list to, to students in a particular class or in a particular team or advisory so that you can apply a a reenrollment or a student checklist, using those settings, just a a convenience feature for getting the right kids, the right information at the right time. And then lastly, here in the setup area is improvements to the visit and interview settings, giving some greater granularity and control over, the types of visits and the, visit openings that you want to make available. And then on the candidate portal side of the house, we have, some user interface improvements to both checklist and decision information that surfaces on the, on the candidate progress page. The, the checklist gives a modern and intuitive view of of what's remaining and what's left, and you have greater control over, what information you show and in the decisions area, up to and including being able to throw confetti for your accepted decisions. So lots of goodness there and additional control over, what shows and where. Now moving on to what's coming next in the enrollment management area, we we continue to work on our contracts area as well as integration with other systems and flexibility in our business processes. In the financial aid, area, we're improving the integration with our black blood financial aid management product, allowing a checklist item to be created that gives the student a or the the family a quick access to go over and create their financial aid application and get that, process started. As well as once they've done that, showing the status of that financial aid application back here in the checklist so that you can see, where that application is, whether it's, you know, you need more information or documentation requirements or if it's already verified and ready to go. That integration is coming soon, and in working we're working in tandem with our, financial aid management product. For contracts, we've got some initial, improvements coming soon here, some filters on our payment plans, which will allow your contracts to only show, payment plans under certain circumstances. And the initial ones, there'll be more coming soon, but they're initial ones are, the the whether the family is a faculty family or whether they, the due dates. We we've already had expiration, but now we have a published time. So a start and end time, and that allows you if you've got, contracts that, that need to be used later in the year that aren't used earlier in the year, you have the ability to control that. Also, in the contracts area is improvements on how you generate contracts. We wanna make that, functionality more available. Some tentative areas is on the assigned contract types to also give the ability to generate, contracts in more scenarios as well as on the contract forms area, being able to go to a form and possibly generate the contracts for that form. Checklist enhancements coming soon are aimed at providing flexibility via conditions, so conditional logic. We wanna be able to support the scenario where, you want a student that's applying for next year to see every step that they might need to go through while a student that's just looking into your school a couple of years from now, to have the steps that you want to provide them like a visitor or an interview, but maybe not the application process. So we wanna give those controls, to you, and, right now, the conditional logic is the focus for our checklist business process streamline. And now I'll pass it over to Jamie so she can talk to you about tuition management. Thanks, Steven. Hi, everyone. My name is Jamie Lyons. I am the product manager for the tuition management product, and I've been around tuition management for the last thirteen years. First up, I'll be taking you through what we have available now, specifically our updated communications, our updated me landing page, the custom field in buy now, and the payment scheduling tool. First up is the updated pair communications. So we have updated our most three frequently sent communications within the product. That is our welcome email, which is sent out ahead of the family's first due date, as well as the prior to debit email and the e invoice, which go out ahead of each due date throughout a family's payment plan. If they are on automatic debit, they get the prior to debit email, and the e invoice they get if they are on the e in on the invoice option. The updates specifically that we've made to these emails, include a uniform styling header and footer that have an area that will list your school's name, the family name, the date of the email, the family ID, as well as the students' names and grades that the email pertains to. And then in the footer area, there will be shortcut links to our terms and conditions at Blackbaud, some frequently asked questions from the payer perspective, as well as a page that lists out contact us information. Also, if your school uploads your school policy, that is linked in shortcut in that footer area if you provide that to us as well. In addition to that, the body of each of these emails has been updated to have more updated relevant information pertaining to the setup of the family's accounts and what they can expect. For the ones that have the prior to debit and e invoice where it's showing the balance that's due, that now actually will break up the details of the balance. Previously, it just listed you owe $5,000, but didn't break down what that was actually comprised of. So that saves the parent the effort from having to log in and go digging for those details or potentially calling your business office, asking those questions. So easily updated that. We also were able to update some of the information in these emails dependent on your particular school settings. So things like if your school does not offer credit cards as an option for payment, we won't show them any credit card information in these emails. And, last but not least in in these email updates, for our schools that use the resource board for their parents to have a single sign on from the, other enroll, enrollment management and education products, they now will be referencing the resource board rather than the parent site for tuition management. So previously, we only ever said they'll log in on the parent site and reference that. That caused a lot of confusion and some BBID issues, so we now are able to recognize if your school uses that option and direct your parents to log in in the appropriate way. Next up is our updated main landing page. So lots of updates happened on this page. The biggest most noticeable one is that it is completely redesigned in Sky UX. So this aligns us better with our other, sister products, essentially, where all the rest of the education products, they are all building things in Sky. So now we are aligning with that right from the start when you first log in. In addition to that, the tiles, now are more updated and accurate as far as the information it's pertaining to. You're also able to, as of this week, move around these tiles, and they're sticky for you. So if maybe you care more about payments and you don't wanna see, your receivables information, you can pull your recent payments tile up to the top of this page, and it will stick there and stay there for you. We also added some new shortcuts along the side of the page where it will always have your most recently accessed families. So if you were busy doing work in there and got distracted and had to navigate away and then go back and finish up what you were doing, that last family you were working on will be shown on that side. In addition to that, if you favorite any of our reports on the reporting page, they will come up on that side now, so that way you don't have to go digging into your reports even though they're saved. They'll just be right there, on the side of the page for you. And last but not least, we also added in the ability to have watch list families. So this may be a way for a school if you know there's a family that's having a hardship and they're trying to work with you and make payments and you wanna keep a close eye on them, there's an option under their account that you can mark them as a watch list family. And if you mark them that way, it'll just automatically pin a shortcut to their account right to that section. So that way, you can just kinda click right on that and bounce right in and not have to go searching for that family or remember their ID, and so on from there. Next is our buy now custom fields. So for our schools that use this feature, within buy now, historically, if you had an item that you were creating that had several options, a good example of this would be if you're selling clothing of any sort and it comes in multiple sizes, you would have to create an individual item for each size option. And if they come in two different colors, that doubles it from there. So what we've done, we've added in a custom field option where you can collect up to five additional fields of information for each individual item that you're creating within buy now. So now instead of having to create a t shirt item for a size small and then another one for a medium and then another one for a large and so on and so forth, you can just create that t shirt item and then be able to collect the size information, the color, the homeroom of the student that's purchasing it, whatever relevant information that you need to collect pertaining to that item you now can do so up to five additional unique fields. And last but not least for our available now items is our payment scheduler. So this tool historically for our payers if they knew they were getting paid in a week and they wanted to go in and schedule a payment and not have to think about it again, they weren't able to do that. They had to log in and make that payment the same day. They weren't allowed to schedule things into the future. So by building out the payment scheduler, payers can now go in and preschedule payments far out into the future from whatever credit card or bank account, that they need to make that payment from. They can make however many payments that they need to. They can have them be all different amounts, any date that works best for them. So that gives them flexibility with making their payment. But an important note with this, they are absolutely still held to their payment plan due dates. So if there is a family that owes a balance and their due date is the tenth, they can make 15 payments leading up to the tenth. As long as they're paid in full by that due date, they're in great shape. So just wanna make clear that that does still align with the existing payment plan structure that we have. Now moving into what we have coming up next, we have in product refunds and two new statements that we're building. First up is our in product refunds. We are nearing the end of the work, for this right now. You're soon going to be able to have refunds go back to your payers from the way that they submitted the payment in tuition management back to that account. So if they made a credit card payment for a thousand dollars and you're issuing them a thousand dollar refund, you no longer have to cut a check and hope that that gets to wherever it has to go. There will be a button within the payment details section where you're able to click to refund that payment, and that thousand dollar payment will go right back to that credit card. There are some some detailed rules and and kind of processes around this. We will be communicating that as the time comes. I probably will use up the rest of our time if I went into all of that detail now, but this is a very long awaited, very exciting update, so be on the lookout, for more details around what this will look like very soon. Next up is our truth in lending statements. So, schools right now, we know, are manually creating these truth in lending statements, and it is a huge effort to for you guys to have to do that. So we wanted to help by being able to collect some information from you on what should be included in them and then generate the statements for you. So you no longer have to do that. So, there'll be a new page under the settings section where you're able to tell us what items should be included in the truth in lending statement, and then we'll be able to generate that statement. Your school will be able to pull them right from the school portal, but even better than that, it will also be available for the parents in the parent portal so they can go and grab that statement whenever and if ever they need it. And last but not least is our payer bills and paid statements. So for these statements, we're hearing a rising, frequency of school choice programs happening throughout the country. And those school choice programs all have different rules and regulations about the data that needs to be submitted to them in order to get reimbursed and qualify, for all of the different benefits that the families get. So with that, we, are creating a new statement that we're hoping will meet those varied needs that are state by state as well as potentially be better even for the, FSA statement reimbursements that families do at the end of every year. So these statements will now clearly show each individual student, what's been billed, how much they've been billed, and if it's been paid. They'll be able to run it on a family or a student basis, and they'll also be able to run it on their own customized date range. So if you need it quarterly, we can do that. If you need it just for a month, that's an option too. If you wanna pull it for the whole school year, we can do that too. So whatever they need, they'll be able to go in and get that information. And then again, same as the truth in lending statements, they'll be able to download that both from the parent site or your schools will be able to get it right out of the admin portal in tuition management. And with that, I will be passing things along to Julia. Hi, everyone. Julia Mesic, and I'm the product manager for Blackbaud Billing Management. I've been at Blackbaud for almost twenty two years, and I have been working with k 12 and higher ed schools the whole time. So we've got a lot to cover for billing managements, so we're gonna get right into it. First off, I'm really excited to announce that we have released autopay for incidental charges. This allows payers to sign up through the payer portal or soon through contracts to automatically pay for charges that fall outside of their payment plan. We also recently released the ability for you all in the back office to apply payments and credits to individual installments. Before this change, if you had an extra payment from a parent or are issuing a credit, a one off credit for financial aid, the payment and credit would have reduced the student's balance in the order of the next due installment versus what this change will allow you to do is sometimes you want that additional, funding to smooth over the remaining installments. And so now you're able to apply those payments and credits to the remaining installments or specific installments versus just having it apply in order of what's due next. We added two or added a change to two areas in billing management to allow you to better, apply payments and credits to specific charges, payment plans, or, charges inside of the payment plan. So within add payments to group and add credits to group, you now have this option to restrict those payments to where you want them to go. This is especially useful for schools who are doing a payroll deduction plan with billing management and you're adding those payments and credits regularly. You can force the applications of those to charges with inside the payment plan or just tuition, for example. We have lots of payment plan updates. The first is within the billing year payment plan, so setting up payment plans, you can now tell the system that you want charges to pay off or be paid off within specific installments. So the classic example of this is your tuition refund plan charge. A lot of schools want that to be paid with the first installment of the payment plan. And so with these changes, you are now able to set it up that way. Then on the student side of things, on their payment plan, you can now adjust the percentages or the amount due on each installment of, of the payment plan. So if a parent calls, they're having a hard time, you're able to adjust that installment to zero and then change the remaining installments, to make up for that amount that you moved. We added a change payment plan wizard, so we know that there are points in the year where parents have decided that they need a different payment plan, than what they signed up for. And so now you're able to use the change payment plan wizard to do all of that for you. Before, you would have had to delete the payment plan, delete the corresponding credits, from financial aid and enrollment deposits, and then regenerate all of that once the new plan is in place. But with the change payment plan wizard, it's gonna automate all of that for you. And if you are a US customer, the, autopay information from the original payment plan will roll over to the new one. We're working on that for our Canadian friends soon. And then Steven touched on these changes, on the enrollment management side, but I wanted to show you what this looks like from the, billing management side, some changes that we have coming. So on a payment plan, within the billing year, you'll be able to restrict a payment plan to faculty only. Again, this is super helpful for your payroll deduction plans that you only wanna make available to faculty. Before, we would have had to create a separate contract just for faculty parents to be able to pick this plan, but now you can have all of the plans show on the contract and have this one be just available for faculty. We have also introduced publish on and expire on dates within the payment plan. So if you have a one pay for a late enrollee or later in the year, you don't have to create a separate contract to handle the different enrollment points and the payment plans that you would need. You can have them all on the same contract. And then using these dates, the contract will be smart, to determine which ones to show at what points in the year. Then switching gears over to the payer portal, we've been doing a lot of work out there in the payer portal. Earlier this year, we gave it a whole refresh by updating it to our, modern theme using Sky UX. But then we've also rearranged some tiles, added additional tiles, the big one being the upcoming due dates tile, which will list out any amount due that the family has, on their account. And then they're able to click on the blue amount and see all of the charges that comprise that amount. So just offering more transparency to your payers so they're not having to call you all to see, what that amount is. And then, just earlier this week, we released our end of year tax statements. So this will help with the the parents who need to provide a statement to their accountants, during tax time to show, what they've paid during the year for aftercare tuition. So now this will show up in the payer portal. There's nothing that the back office has to do except plug in your tax ID number in our settings area, and then this will automatically generate each, beginning of each calendar year so that, parents can give this to their accountant or use it themselves if they're doing their own taxes. Alright. So then let's switch over to what we have coming up soon. We are working on adjusting posted transactions. So earlier this year, we we released a whole bunch of functionality about around reversing posted transactions, but it reverses the full amount versus this work will allow the billing clerk to adjust posted transactions for the unapplied amount. So if you have students that withdraw, instead of reversing the entire tuition charge, you can reverse the amount remaining and have that accounted for appropriately in your general ledger. We've been working and talking about refunds within billing management for a long time, but in the next few months, we'll be going into our customer tech preview with refunds within billing management. So this will be a new record type, a new transaction type within billing management that allows you all to track money back to a family in a first class way rather than creating an offsetting transaction to balance out the account. So at first, this is just the transaction within billing management, but over time, this will be something that will, be able to send over to accounts payable to issue a check back to the family or to, to send the amount back via Blackbaud Merchant Services, for example. And then finally, on the billing management front, we are working on a new area called collections assistant. The collections assistant will bring together all of the information that's needed to take a look at a family's account that has has fallen behind in making payments. So you're able to see their payment plan, their outstanding balance, of course. You'll be able to see information about siblings. If it's a split family, information about them. And then you'll have actions that you can take throughout the system, but it's all together in one place. So adding a late charge, adding a hold, adding an action, and, of course, adding a payment or a credit. But then my favorite part is the email functionality that we'll be offering that leverages Blackbaud AI to help create those tailored messages that we hear that you're sending outside of billing management. You can have the system generate the contents based off of tone and urgency and then any actions that you may be taking, like adding a hold or a late fee. If you don't like what it generated, you can have it try again or add your own text. And then once that email sends, it will log it as an action on the student's account so that you have a history of the communication that went out. And that's all she wrote for billing management. I'm gonna turn it over to Erin for financial aid. Thank you, Julia. Hi, everybody. Aaron Wachholz here, product manager for Blackbaud Financial Aid Management, and I'll be closing out our pub session today. Thanks for sticking it out here to the very end, and we're gonna be running just right up to, the perfect end time here. So, I have been with Blackbaud for almost nine years. It'll be nine years in this coming February, and I've been in the, k 12 side of things for the entire time, that I've been here. As my bio there indicates, I've been in the k 12 space my whole career, in a wide variety of roles from, within schools, all the way up to where I am today. So glad to be here with you, and let's jump into a few updates for Blackbaud Financial Aid Management. So a couple of things we're gonna touch on here that are available now are continued ops, excuse me, enhancements to the omnibar and the resource board tile for enrollment management. So the resource board tile here is just an addition to make things better for parents and to, lead towards the more connected system story that we're, working towards, as a as a whole pillar of products. So this just makes things easier for families to get to their financial aid application site, from the dashboard, that you can set up for your for your parents. So, we did implement that, and that is a lot, available and live for anyone to use today. We also continue to enhance the omnibar. So we implemented the omnibar a while ago, and we're just continuing to build upon that. We, as have been mentioned, the other presentations today in financial aid are continuing to implement the Sky UX, wherever we can. Anytime we build something new, it's in Sky UX, and we'll be looking at what that looks like for the parent, experience here in the coming up section. But the, the omnivar just gives again that connected experience for the school user to be able to navigate between different products that you might be using within Blackbaud. The, going forward, we continue to just take navigation items from our old functionality and move them up into the omnibar. So, eventually, that gray bar that you see on that screenshot there where it says home and families, eventually, that will go away, and everything will be up in the omnibar. So, that is existing functionality today. I really love the new help, feature that we have there. We also have a search feature that we created to put in the omnibar as well to help you find applicants quickly. So a lot of great features there. We just keep adding to that, and we look forward to continuing to provide value, for all of you through that omnibar functionality. Alright. So coming up next, continuing that connected system story through financial aid as a checklist step in the enrollment management process, parent application enhancements, and the connection with the IRS. Alright. So the connection with the IRS, we've been working on this extremely diligently for a while now. We, have are very close to releasing this, into an EAP state, followed by a general availability release, also coming in the in the very near future here. So, this is a big, win for us. We know it's a highly valued piece of functionality for both parents that are applying because it reduces the number of documents they have to upload. It and for parents too and schools, it will increase the time of processing of processing of the application because it's less documentation our review team has to review and automates the process more. Just providing simplicity and efficiency across the board for everybody from the parents to our review team to you on the school side, as you wanna get those applications processed and verified as quickly as possible so you can make awards in a timely manner. So we continue to work on this, and it's it's getting very, very close, and we're excited to be able to put this out in the hands of all of you in the very near future. The, checklist step item here is something that's also, I think, going to be a huge benefit for schools that are using both enrollment management and financial aid management. Again, the connected system storyline here, we want to make it easy for your parents where they can simply see the checklist step item here and go right from the checklist step item into their financial aid application process. We have more future, thoughts around how this can be even more embedded in the enrollment management system, so keep an eye and an ear out for those, as time goes on. But this is kind of the first phase of that where the parents will be able to just have that connected ease of access for, we don't want to be an impediment in the admissions and enrollment process. Right? We want everything to flow smoothly. We want your parents to be in one place all at one time, and that's our ultimate goal here. So excited to have this, and it's been great working with Steven and the enrollment management team as we continue to to build this out and have this ready for you to take advantage of as well. And as I mentioned earlier, the parent application enhancements. So this work we actually had gotten pretty far along with earlier in 2025. And then when the opportunity prevented itself, we pivoted to the IRS integration work and put this work on pause. So the cool thing is here is we've done a lot of work already on the parent, enhancements. We have two kind of ways that we're looking at this. The parent portal is one version, which is what we're working on first, which is where the parents first log into the system. You might also think of it as their as their dashboard sort of, where they access the application, they can upload documents, they can see communications and things like that. That's all being redesigned and that will be the first phase of this. The second phase will be the actual application itself, and we plan to have this redesigned and ready for use for next year's application cycle. So that would be ready in the 2026 for I guess that would be for the 2728 academic year if I've got my numbers right there. So that's our plan with that. The whole purpose of this redesign is to modernize the look and feel into the Sky UX platform as you see here from these screenshots. We really wanna do a deep dive into our application today and understand from both parents and schools, what do we need to improve? Are there questions that we are asking that we don't need? Can we make it shorter? Can we make it faster for families? How can we streamline the process across the board and modernize the look and feel? So, again, very excited about this work as well that's in front of us, and the benefits that your parents and you, I think, will receive, from those updates. So that is coming soon. And, with that, it brings us to the end of our time here today. And I just wanna say thank you on behalf of all the product managers that spoke today, Paul and Corey and and all of our leadership here in the k twelve pillar. We're very, very excited to share these things with you. We're very thankful for you as our customers. We appreciate you very much. We're here. If you need anything, reach out. We're always happy to talk to you. We really appreciate your time with us here today. So thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.