Name: Agility in Action: Transforming your K–12 Business Office, featuring Berwick Academy
Uploaded: 2026-02-05T19:32:20.434Z
Duration: 49 min 48 s
Description: Agility in Action: Transforming your K–12 Business Office, featuring Berwick Academy

Transcript for "Agility in Action: Transforming your K–12 Business Office, featuring Berwick Academy": Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for today's webinar, agility in action, transforming your k twelve business office featuring Berwick Academy and a partner spotlight with ODIN. A few quick callouts as we get settled. The webinar audio will be broadcast through your computer speakers, so hopefully you can all hear me. As always, you will receive the recording to this about twenty four hours after the fact. If you need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen to turn your captions on and off. Oops. Sorry, guys. We just hopped up there. If you encounter any audio or technical issues such as the slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. And worst case scenario, you can leave and log back in. Please click on q and a on the top right to submit any questions that you might have. We just ask that when you submit your question, you add as much detail and be as specific as possible. We will do our best to answer during today's session if we can. Likewise, if we don't get to your question, we have seen it and we will follow-up after. So no worries there. Next to q and a, you'll see the docs area. Please click on this to access several links and resources that you might want to view either during today's session or after the fact. And you can adjust any settings by using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. Wanted to let everyone know that one of our teammates, Sophie hey, Sophie, is on the webinar today, and she is ready to message with you. So you'll see that messages area. Sophie is here to answer sales specific questions and further understand your current work processes, workflows, and pain points. Talking with her is really easy, just five minutes over chat or the phone, and it's the fastest way to get information on how Blackbaud can help meet your school's specific needs. She will help get you connected with your account executive for next steps as quickly as the next business day. So thanks for joining us, Sophie. So you can either message with her using the messages area. Likewise, I wanna call out that there's a link in the docs area to book a quick fifteen minute phone call with her. Just a reminder before we get started and get into the demos that sometimes things can change. The majority of what we will show today is either live and in product or in development and nearing general availability. So while some details might change a little bit, our overall vision does remain consistent. As shown in the visual here with more than forty years of experience in private independent k 12 schools, Blackbaud offers a total school solution that connects every facet of your school. We have the essential software to connect enrollment and academics with your business office and development, all with a robust single sign on family portal, ensuring that everyone has the tools and information they need to drive students student success. Today's webinar is going to help focus on a really important part of your school. It's why you're here, connecting revenue streams. So we are going to highlight billing management along with financial at GenXT, and, of course, hand it over at the end to our partner, Odin, to talk about their point of sale solution. Before we get to our panel and then into the demos, I just wanna address something that we know is top of mind for some of our schools using tuition management, those that have heard about it. You might notice that we are, of course, as I mentioned, showing billing management today. And that's simply because billing management is where we are investing for the long term. It is the future of our billing platform. But we wanna be very clear. If you are on tuition management today, nothing is changing for you right now. Billing management represents the long term direction of our billing platform because it's built natively into Blackbaud's k 12 ecosystem, enrollment, student information, learning management, financial aid, and financial edge NXT. Tuition management continues to be fully supported and actively improved in the product. We are still investing in it. We know how important it is for our day to day operations. So we are taking a very careful and phased approach to migrations. There is no broad or mandatory switch that's happening. When it's a good time for your school to switch and to be a good fit, we'll make sure that you have all of the capabilities and we'll work on reaching out to you. Our goal is to make future transitions smooth, supported, and predictable. So we're showing you billing management, of course, because we wanna show you the direction that we are heading. So let me get to the really good parts of what we're about to talk about. So in just a minute, I'm gonna hand it over to our panelists to talk about the ways in which Berwick Academy has streamlined their business office. And that's going to be because we're gonna have some q and a with Berwick Academy. We're gonna show you our solutions, Blackbaud Billing Management and Financial Edge NXT, and then we're gonna hand it over to our partners over at ODIN. So we're gonna start off. Julia Messick, our product manager for billing management, is gonna have a chat with Seth Heard, the director of information systems and financial controller at Berwick Academy. We're then going to pass the ball to the one and only Jen Haley, one of our solutions consultants here at Blackbaud, and then Mark Bay, chief operating officer at ODIN will take us home. So without further ado, I'm going to stop sharing my slides, and I'm gonna ask Julia and Seth hop on the stage. There you all are. Alright. I'll hand it over to you all. Seth, thank you so much again for joining us. We really appreciate your time and your expertise and just sharing all that you have done for with us. Thanks, Elizabeth. And, yes, just like Elizabeth said, thank you so much, Seth, for being here. I'm very excited to share the stage with you. So let's get started. Tell me tell everyone about you and your school. That's amazing. Alright. So since adopting billing management and FE NXT, what efficiencies have you gained? Yeah. So I I would start by saying, you know, for for we had a great product beforehand, but it was I think we were very, sort of back office centric and not really sort of, you know, end user centric. And I think we need I think businesses now need to be more sort of experience centric. We're increasing the numerator. Right? We have more parents. We have more students. We have more transactions, but we're not changing sort of the denominator. So we need to somehow figure out, how to sort of leverage our systems and products in a way that does, in fact, make it easier. So I think some of the bottlenecks, I think, were, you know, sort of what was the the parent experience? What was, sort of our our posting and reconciliation experience, reporting, those sort of things. And I think, you know, as we sort of have adopted billing management, right, there's some granularity that comes, so from the functionality for that. And I tend to over post, but the ability, unlike some systems that are post in a closed environment, if you need to sort of get down and drill into a transaction or do some research, that might be a little can be more challenging. Whereas, you know, you have the ability to both report in the lists or to drill down in your posting in a granular level that, I think, it speeds up some of that reconciliation and reporting time. That's awesome. I love that. You've described how a connected system or ecosystem with Blackbaud improves the parent experience, Mhmm. and you kind of touched on that. Yeah. What has changed for your families as you've as you've moved to this seamless cloud based experience? Well, a couple of ways. One, I think there's a a higher degree of self help because sort of like that, you know, not being as sort of business or back office centric, we now are sort of putting some of the power in the parents' hand where they have the ability. They know how to go on and get their grades or they know how to go on and and see attendance and those sort of things. So they know how to already get to their platform and then to have sort of their billing available there. Right? It's very self help. They can do their payments. They can see their payment plan, and they can do it at any time. You know? Whereas in the past, maybe we could put a statement or an email statement. It was very static. Now they have access to sort of dynamic data that they can interact with, you know, seamlessly. That's awesome. You mentioned that you may be overpost. I don't think that that's a thing when you're posting to FE NXT. I wish more of it more often. How has posting from billing into FE NXT changed visibility for your budget owners or your administrators, folks on the the FE side of things? Sure. Yes. I I would speak about posting in two ways. You know, Berwick's been around in with billing management for, I think, four ish years now. So, you know, we're we're familiar with the the posting to a third party, and we're also familiar with the posting direct to FE and XD. And I think the ability to either to post at the detailed level in ways that give budget managers, whether they're looking at a revenue center or an expense line, they can see that detail, you know, in ways they might not if you're if you're posting in in summary. You can cultivate your posting details in ways that are meaningful to your end users so that they can understand and have the clarity of what they need to know. Awesome. I know you're a big fan of payment assistant in FE NXT. I think you're a part of the EAP for that. Which manual steps have disappeared? How has that been going? What gains have you realized with with using payment assistant? Yeah. Yeah. I think I've been quoted as saying it's the thing you don't know that you absolutely need. I and I say often, like, it has cut my our payroll processing time not payroll. Sorry. Accounts payable time in half. One reason, because it's in product. But the and because of that, there are you know, you don't have to worry about exporting or, you know, pulling information into a third party platform. So all of that part of the work is in product. In addition, the approval process, is also in platform. So your users who review can do that seamlessly. But the other place where it really is a time saver is sort of post payment, you know, sort of fielding calls about, you know, what's the status of the payment, what happened, where is it. All of that is right there in the the vendor record or the invoice record. So it it's a super time saver. That's awesome. I know you and I work closely together with billing management, and you've said in the past that one advantage of working with Blackbaud is having a voice in product development. When you share with everyone where your feedback direct directly shaped either billing management or FE NXT or both, and how that has impacted your team? Yeah. I I mean, I that's a big topic, and I think I would just echo that by saying I think Blackbaud has valued, you know, sort of clients' input and feedback, and that's sort of influential to the road map. You know, of course, you can't get everything that you want. But as you know, I'm I'm constantly emailing you and saying, can you make this tweak? Can you? Can you? And I think the same thing has happened with payment assistance and some other areas that I think that that you, the product managers, and the development teams are very responsive to. Like, what's live? What's actually happening in the client's experience? And, like, what is meaningful to them? This is not essentially where you want the company to go, is to build a product that is meaningful and useful to the client. Yes. For sure. And as as the product manager, I couldn't do what I do without having direct working relationships with with folks like Youssef. You know, what what you provide to me and my team in terms of, you know, direction and and all of that. It's so valuable, and I I don't think there's anything that exists in billing management that hasn't been as a result of a customer asking for it. And. I I think that that's an awesome thing. Okay. Last question. Yeah. I we know we have Odin here, Mark from Odin. You use Odin. Tell us how you guys are using it. How does it work for you? Share that with everybody. Sure. Yeah. We use the point of sale system in our in our snack bar. We use it in our school store. We also use it in our technology center, so it's the point of sale system. We use it for imaging, so we do our student IDs. Okay. And we also use the the MyKids spending to sort of fund our debit accounts in the snack bar. And we're utilizing some of the integration with Blackbaud in a couple of ways. One is we're using sort of the integration between sort of, like, the photos. So student photos in Blackbaud are being seamlessly pushed over to to Odin, you know, for identification purposes. We're using the integration with billing management. So our transactions that happen in the school store that are charge accounts gets for us, gets swept nightly directly into into billing management. So those are live. You know, a student buys something, you know, at the store, you know, that evening or the next day, parents can see that transaction. And we're also utilizing Odin for at Blackbaud's integration in the merchant services. So so funding those accounts flow through our our merchant service account. Awesome. Anything else you wanna share? Oh, goodness. I I don't know. I I certainly appreciate sort of the the work. And just go back to sort of the the voice that the, you know, that Blackbaud listens to from its clients and to be able to to partner both, you know, between client and Blackbaud, but also with a third party like Odin. I think that's the way we can go back to that. How do we make it, you know, sort of end user parent centric and make it back office efficient, not necessarily centric, but back office efficient, but make it really, you know, seamless and ease of use and positive experience for our parents or end users. Love that. Awesome. Thank you so much, Seth. Yeah. Thank you. that, I would love to bring Jen up to the stage to show off billing management and FE and XT. Great. Thanks, Julia and Seth. Appreciate all of that. Setting me up for this. Let me just make sure I get my screens organized here. Alright. So we're gonna spend some time today looking at some of the highlights of things that Seth mentioned regarding billing management and financial NGXT and a couple of other high points there before I turn it over to market Odin. So as we kind of enter into this experience, kind of going back to that connected revenue stream content that Elizabeth was presenting earlier, really, we're looking for, right, is an environment where at maybe even beginning at the financial aid status or financial aid award step in a process that we are able to make those awards, send those awards electronically right down to an enrollment contract, use that enrollment contract to capture, right, payment information and ACH or credit card setups, auto provision billing accounts, manage all of that billing and tuition and incidental fee structures, and then, of course, have it all integrated and passing, right, electronically into the general ledger down in Financial Edge NXT. So that really starts for us here, right, at the time that the parents are entering into the Blackbaud Education Management Suite, where Seth mentioned, right, they're already going today to look at grades, to look at the schedules, to look at when the sports teams are playing tonight, to check their calendars. And now we have an ability, right, to embed, their experience when it comes to, of course, their enrollment agreement and the billing experience there as well. Seeing here on the screen, right, that example of that enrollment contract, the displaying of all of the tuition and required fee structures, the ability to opt into additional fee structures at the time of enrollment, potentially the the embedding of your financial aid or need based merit scholarships and other things on the crediting area, and then quickly moving into, right, the selection of their payment plan, opting in potentially for tuition insurance and having a tuition insurance embedded agreement, and the ability for them to then begin enrolling in autopay, sign, pay their deposit or enrollment fee, and then go ahead and hit submit. And then this updating, of course, the enrollment management, system with the fact that this family is enrolling for the next school year or returning for the next school year if you are doing a a contract or continuous enrollment agreement. And then at that point, it is then auto provisioning all of the billing accounts. Because billing management is built on the core education management structure, we are living in a world where the parent demographic data, right, is all on that singular core contact record. If parent goes in today and updates any information or a new family is added into the system, right, they are immediately added to the other areas of the tool. The billing portal for parents lives right here, again, as Seth was mentioning, along with all of their other resources and directories and calendars. And as you mentioned before, right, I have access to view, right, the current bill to see all of the detail of what's going on with inside the billing management, accounts to get really detailed information around charges, what exactly these particular charges are for, the payments, my installments, all of my crediting, that's available there as well. Additionally, access to my statement. The statement builder is built here with inside of the education management suite, allows for a great flexibility for schools to determine what their statement looks like, how it is arranged, and the ability to embed, write, multiple student charges in varying different ways on those statements as well. Payment plans, again, the ability to view payment plans, the ability to have multiple styles of payment plans. In fact, if I had multiple children here at the school, I could choose, right, potentially for Logan here, a biannual payment plan, but maybe for my younger son, Connor, I wanna put him on a ten month payment plan, and I might also wanna use different payment arrangements, right, for those experiences. All of that functionality is available today, with inside billing management. In addition to an opportunity for schools to make decisions around putting tuition and fee structures in a standard payment plan that maybe operates and processes on the tenth of the month, as well as potentially opting into an incidental payment plan through that contract experience that then puts my incidental charges maybe on the twentieth of the month and the ability to set both of those payment plans up on auto pays and also different auto pays if I so choose. So a lot of flexibility, as Seth was mentioning, for our parent and end user communities so that we can meet what I have now started calling kind of dynamic family household billing. Of course, in today's scenarios, right, we have instances where families are separated, but we also have instances where grandma's heavily involved in paying tuition, and she wants to receive her own statement. She wants to set up her own auto pay potentially, or we have step parents or other people involved. Billing management allows for that style of accommodation as well, which I'm gonna show you here in a moment. Families can also update their payment methods directly here in the payer portal, and they can run their own end of year statements individually by student, as well. Harkening back to that kind of dynamic family household billing, again, on the student three sixty degree profile in the education management suite, will now have a tab here as you see for billing. And in particular, with that dynamic family household is a lot of flexibility, here to really create, dynamic billing accounts that allow for lots of exceptions to rules, the ability to create statements that are very specific to certain charges, that are specific to certain individuals, and to follow, right, those rules. As the enrollment contract comes into billing management, the system will look at those contracts, look at the rules that are here on the statement recipient and payer tile, and then take all of the billing items and then separate them out according to these rules. That will also remain true as you go forward adding charges, adding credits, and other things. Again, we'll come back to these rules or ask you who does this apply to in this dynamic family household situation. So as you can see here, standard splits but exceptions to certain fee structures, the addition of a step parent taking care of this or grandparent. So lots of flexibility and options here within billing management to help manage those scenarios that we're all dealing with today at school. Additionally, right, because we are integrated with the student information system, where we are rostering, right, all of our students into courses, into grade levels, into athletic teams, into activity groups, The ability to come in and add charges to a group, is another great functionality within billing management that really drives the ability to pull roster data directly into the billing system and then go ahead and apply charges in a bulk fashion. So as you can see here, I can pull a particular grade level. I could pull that particular section of AP biology because the AP exam's coming up, and I need to apply that particular exam fee to those students who are enrolled right in AP bio. Or I could go out and pull, right, the roster for the basketball team because it's that time of year where we are going to be charging potentially for uniforms or the basketball team is going to a tournament this weekend. Right? And there are some additional costs that are associated with that. So the ability again to go through, select those particular grade levels, activity groups, or teams, identify, right, who's involved, easily go through, add a particular fee type, like, let's say, third grade is going on a field trip this year. I have a field trip fee in my fee chart. Right? I don't have to have an instance of this is the farm trip. This is the San Francisco trip. This is the basketball conference trip. I can go ahead and have a much more tailored down fee structure. I can have default charge amounts that I can easily adjust and then easily add a comment, right, for the families that will appear back in that payer portal, back on that statement that I was showing you before so that's very clear to the family what was this field trip for, when did this occur. I hit finish. The system goes out and grabs for me the entire fourth grade roster. Maybe at this point, the teacher has sent me an email that basically says, yep. Everyone is going, but you know what? Justin's not gonna be here, and Kelsey's not gonna be able to go. Easily remove them. I can easily edit amounts if we're making right reductions in costs for certain families in some instances, and then go ahead and just add these charges in bulk across that roster. So, again, a much more seamless, right, quick and easy access to roster data, again, because we're living inside that same education management suite that includes all of that data for us there as well. Some of the other fun things I like in the add charges to group is the fact that you can, of course, use an Excel template. So again, you often receive charges from other parts of the school. We wanna make sure we can upload those very easily. And even better inside of billing management is the ability to paste a list of names. So how often do we get that email from a teacher? Right? Please charge these 10 students for this particular, you know, charge. And then, again, I have to go and look up every single individualized student. Now I can paste that list of names. It will pull the accounts as you see them here, and I can easily bulk apply, as needed there as well. The other big advantage here with billing management is that it will operate and process through Blackbaud integrated payments. And due to that, platform integration, we also then will disperse all of your payments directly here into billing management on the disbursement tab. So you can see here, I've had two disbursements. Again, depending on my choice at the school, if I am passing on any of the fee structures related to credit card processing. This can be very clean where the gross amount and the net amount will remain the same, or it will be you very clear to me, right, what amount of fees have been reduced from my deposit. I can drill down, as Seth was mentioning before, to get into the detail, right, to see the payments that are included in this particular disbursement. The disbursement report from Blackbaud Integrated Payments is attached here to every single disbursement. And then, of course, I can drill into the detail, right, to see exactly who this payment was for. The scenario is for myself. But also the details of what's included, right, in those in that payment, what charges were paid off as part of this particular payment here today. So a lot of detail available here in what is now a true subledger, right, to Financial Edge NXT where I can, again, detail or summary post to Financial Edge and maintain all of the detail that our auditors are looking for, that we're looking for, potentially that our parents are looking for. Right? Because all of this data is available for them as well over in the payer portal. When it comes to posting into, financial ed GenXT, as Seth was saying, he posts all the time, which we think is great, is the ability to post much more frequently, and to also be very selective about the types of things that you're posting. There are certainly certain points that every time during the school year where certain things are gonna come up that we want to post together. We certainly also wanna post to help make our bank reconciliation much easier down inside Financial Edge. So at this point in the school year, right, we're in the heat of the enrollment and reenrollment season. We're collecting those enrollment deposits. And so now I can go out and grab all of those enrollment deposits together, or I can grab a from the disbursement from Blackbaud Merchant Services, right, an entire grouping of the disbursement payments, put those all together into my post to general ledger batch, which then would match right downstream that bank deposit. So it's an easier match and clear when I arrive down in Financial Edge. So, again, ability to really filter down my batch posting, again, by type, transaction date, post date. I can post specific fees. So, again, especially around that time of year, maybe when we are going on large trips, and I have a bunch of trip fees that I wanna put together. We've been collecting those. Right? And now I wanna post those altogether right down into Financial Edge. Or the credits or deposit. Right? I can use deposit nomenclature, whether it's checks and cash, but batch those altogether. Go ahead and notate those based on maybe a deposit and a date. Right? And then batch deposit into the bank, and then, again, matching ClearDown and Financial Edge. And I can post all the way down into a specific general ledger account. The full access to the general ledger is available directly inside billing management. So as I'm setting up all of my tuition rates, my fee structures, my deposits, my crediting, all of those are tied directly to the general ledger down in Financial Edge all the way down into the project record level if you are using projects today inside FE NXT to help with segmented reporting, budgeting, and tracking. When I do batch over into Financial Edge NXT, it appears here for me, in a open, fully distributed, fully balanced batch, that has whatever level of detail, as Seth mentioned, that I'd like to have here in Financial Edge. This was a detailed post. It has the summary, some summary detail along the top. But you can see here, I also control the journal reference. So I can see cash payments. I can see charge data specific to a student. It's including the student ID over in the education management suite. If I have set it up that way with inside the journal reference. And again, as I mentioned, all the way down into that project level detail so that, again, I can manage, run a balance sheet right on those particular project areas. It is a two way data sync between Financial NXT and billing management. So, again, in my post to general ledger tile here on the home screen, I can easily see the status, right, of all of my created post. And as things are happening down inside Financial Edge, again, as I picked up that open batch, I've run it through an approval process potentially inside the office, and then I've gone ahead and posted that batch into the ledger. It is now updated for me across here in billing management that that batch has been posted, and has captured the date of that posting there as well. So lots of data sharing, between those systems, allowing for a really clear picture of what's happening with our posting and what the current statuses are of those as well today. As we kinda move into some of the experiences that Seth was managing mentioning down inside Financial Edge NXT, We will talk about payment assistant and some other pieces here, but I do also wanna point out there are some new functionalities with inside expense management that have recently come here that are tied into, right, payment assistant, as Seth mentioned before. So if you're not currently using expense management today, right, this is an experience for your downstream end users at the school who have varying different styles of experiences that they might need to engage here in expense management. One, for those individuals who are holding a school credit card, the ability to reconcile, right, those charges to go ahead and use the AI document intelligent scanner, which is natively built here into Financial Edge NXT. This generate request also lives in our credit card transaction area, allows me to upload that credit card receipt. It allows me to distribute that charge into a budget area at a very high level that has already been tailored and attached to the general ledger to go ahead and then send that expense through an approval workflow that can go in varying diff directions depending on the amounts, depending on who that charge is associated to, what budget that charge is gonna be hitting here inside Financial Edge, and really does bring that credit card reconciliation experience directly here into Financial Edge. The master credit card feed is fed into expense management. It splits it into the individualized users, and then they come and engage, right, with the uploading of their receipts, and sending those through. And then that then is posted against the master credit card fee where you can match and clear those transactions, and then, of course, updating all of our budgets, updating all of our actuals, that we are then sharing with budget leaders across the school. Very similar experience for those who are doing invoice submissions. Again, I've got an invoice in my hand that I need to submit. Needs to go through an approval process. It needs to arrive in the accounts payable area for payment. Again, the ability to use, right, the AI document intelligence scanner, right, to upload those particular, transactional pieces of data to have that invoice display here directly for me and to have the AR document intelligence scanner prepopulate the invoice or the credit card transaction with all the levels of detail that I need, distribution, custom fields, the receipts already attached. I hit submit. Right? And then it's moving on through its process internally within the office. And then, again, arriving down in our payables area so that we can then begin using payment assistant as one of the options for payment natively here inside of Financial Edge NXT. As Seth mentioned, payment assistant is a payment run experience, that is native to Financial Edge NXT that can really help, make your payables process much more efficient. As you see here, have a variety of different styles of payment runs. These payment runs can include multiple invoices, of course, multiple vendors, but also can include multiple payment methods based on those vendor selections. So in this particular, experience here in payment run number four, I have, three or four, three different vendors who I am paying. I am paying four different invoices in this experience. Each of these individualized vendors has also chosen to be paid in a different way. What happens here is this payment run can also be sent through an additional approval workflow. So we may have already done all the invoice approval workflow in the payables area. Now we're moving into a payment run approval. So, again, the AP person responsible at the school has put all those payments through or those invoices through, and now I'm going to then approve, right, this $46,000 payment run. Can have multiple tiers of approvals. It can be, you know, driven by amounts or other things that you might need. At that point, this payment run is picked up by the team here at Blackbaud, and we begin processing and pulling these payments. So in this scenario, for example, $46,000 singular ACH draw is gonna be taken from your bank account. From there, we will place that amount into an FBO account and begin processing ACH, EFT, and also virtual card payments as well as do remote check printing. The remote check printing functionality will have your nomenclature on it, will go out, in in a standard process of the check processing. A scanned copy of that check will arrive and be attached to the invoice into the vendor record here with inside Financial Edge NXT. The ACHs will be sent out, EFT potentially virtual card payments if the vendor is interested in those. Automated, communications will be sent out to those vendors, letting them know that the payment is on route, what invoices that payment is going to be covering, and the amount as well as the payment method that the vendor selected. In addition, if you have vendors who have recently come into the system, right, the team will reach out to those vendors to establish payment arrangements. So, again, taking a little bit of onus off of the business office at the school to get all of that vendor related detail, here in the system. Once all the payments have processed through the payment run, we'll make its way through varying statuses. And so you'll see this one's currently in pending approval. It'll move into full approval. It'll move into payment processing as the individualized payments are clearing the FBO account. Those will update here, including those checks. We will do stale check chasing for you as well if those checks don't clear in a certain period of time and try to encourage the vendor to potentially move right to an electronic payment if needed or reissue. And at that point, once all the payments have cleared, the payment run will be finalized. And, again, from a bank reconciliation perspective, we have now had to only reconcile one ACH draw from our bank account at the school level to offset, right, this payment run as well. So a lot of flexibility, a lot of efficiency being gained here, a lot of removing of some of these more manual processes of individualized files being uploaded to the bank. Of course, we all know, right, checks are costly expense, right, to any organization today. In fact, a double expense, right, if they don't receive the check or the check is lost in the mail. And we also have, of course, right, the fraud issues that come along with check processing today. So in an attempt to really try to help our clients, right, to avoid, right, some of those things today is why payment assistant came into play here with Inside Financial Edge NXT, and it is fully included in your Blackbaud subscription as well. And lastly, I just wanna point out, right, some of the reporting functionality, right, that we can get as all of this data, right, is flowing into Financial Edge NXT. We've got the project records, got the payables process, we've got expense management happening. And so, yes, of course, the reporting functionality, the scheduling of budget reports, but also the ability to surface, right, quite a bit of detail, here in our dashboard area for our finance teams and higher level administrator, board of trustee members, other budget leaders right at the school. So some examples here, right, of a school finance dashboard that is looking at kind of those big KPIs that we're looking for at schools, our operating budget, the enrollment data, where are we at on net tuition revenue, how are we doing on our spend, you know, with inside our financial aid budgets, other big ones like the annual fund, right, that contributory revenue stream that, you know, there are two basic revenue streams, our tuition and incidental fee structures, and then our contributory revenue. So I wanna keep an eye on those. Again, working capital operating expense in varying different ways, right, to display this kind of data here as well. Another good one here with inside FinancialAgenxT T that is available for you to create would be one if you are a member of NBOA. NBOA conference coming up here at the March. Hope that we will see some of you there. But, again, the ability to really create the answers to the NBOA survey or things like the DAZZLE survey if you're doing and you're part of that experience each year. So, again, creating of the answers to those and having the system, right, really do that work for us here versus, again, extracting data out into Excel and manipulating it to get to the answers, right, for those types of experiences. So this is just one example that one of my colleagues built around how to answer, in particular, the MBOA annual survey there as well. Your payables dashboard, of course, is gonna surface all your payables for you, kind of give you your aging, allow you to look at, right, invoices by status and by posting, and a little full listing of all your unpaid invoices so we can kind of stay on top of those and use payment assistant, right, to make this as efficient as we can. Other opportunities around expense management, right, being able to see the status of whether it's invoices, credit card transactions, other things that are in process with inside expense management so that we can, of course, write you know, reminders are going out to people to approve and update and do their expense management expense is today, but it's good for us to be able to see kind of overall at the school level, right, where we're in these processes, as well as for budget leaders to understand, right, when they look at their budget actuals and financial edge NXT, that there can be other things, right, that are still processing through that they need to be aware of, right, especially as we come to the end of the fiscal year. We're looking at budget spends, and make sure that we're not overspending our budgets as well. And then lastly, here's just another kind of school KPI one that kind of mixes and matches some other things around net tuition, annual givings per student. So, again, just varying different ways to look at data, directly here in Financial Edge, really surface data, and can be helpful, especially for your nonfinancial users who aren't used to, right, reading a financial statement on a consistent basis, and really understanding, what that what that kind of a report might be telling them on a consistent daily basis. So it was a quick look here at financial edge NXT and billing management and really that concept of an integrated connected revenue system, right, that is attached to all of these other areas of the school, that impact, right, the financial statements and our ability to do billing in a very efficient way. Hope that was helpful. Do also wanna point out, right, with ODIN, the ability, of course, right, to bring those charges from ODIN directly into billing management and experience for our parents with inside the parent portal with ODIN. And at that, I'm gonna turn it over to Mark from ODIN to kind of give you a little more detail, around that as well. Thanks, Mark. Well, Mark, you're on Thanks, Chad. I think Elizabeth has a quick announcement. Oh, sorry. yeah. That's it. Yep. Nope. You are all good, Jen. Thank you so much. Of course. Just wanted to let everybody know that as market goes into his slides and explanation of ODIN, I'm gonna open up a poll. And that's where you can raise your hand to say, yep. I'd like to learn more about Odin, and then we will make sure that we pass it on to that team so that they can get you information and have a conversation. So I hit that button. So now you should see that magic poll area, and I'll leave that open. And without further ado, Mark, now I will hand it over to you. Well, you, Elizabeth, and thanks for everyone tuning into this webinar. We really appreciate it. I'm here to tell you a little bit more about Odin. So we were founded in 1991. That makes us 35 years old this year. Time really does fly. We have 300 customers, a little over 300 customers across The US and Canada. We're a point of sale and incidental spending management solution, and we're purposely built for for independent schools. So we we've we came out of, a chip card in the nineties that replaced a charge slip process at boarding schools. So for these thirty five years, we've been serving independent schools the entire time. And I I think a easy way to think about us in the context of Blackbaud is we are designed for any nontuition expense at the school. So cafeteria, school store, concessions, things like that. So billing management has you fully covered on tuition. We're kinda there for everything else, all the other little areas that are that spending occurs on campus. And I should mention we've been black bar blackbaud partners since 2017, so it's been a long time and looking forward to ten years of partnership next year. So the Odin solution itself has three pillars. There's the front end, which is the point of sale. That could be an all in one touchscreen computer or an iPad. We also offer a kiosk now. The next part portion is the back end. That's the patrons management suite where inventory reports and you and management of student accounts is done. However, we're integrated to Blackbaud SIS, so almost all of the information that we use comes from your central database, and we don't have to have much administrative effort as, on the actual Oden back end. Thanks to those integrations. And then the final portion is the parent facing side, which is the MyKids spending website and app. We have iOS and Android app. And this is where parents can go online to add funds to the student account and also view student spendings. I should mention that there's two types of spending, at school. It's two two methods. One is inclining balance, so that's where charges are collected and then imported to billing management to be billed for there. The other is declining balance, and that's where funds are added to an account through MyKids spending. And then as the student spends around campus, those funds are deducted. So we have integrations to Blackbaud that support both of, oops, both of those, both of those for, inclining and declining balance systems. The first one I already mentioned, it's the integration to the SIS, the Blackbaud SIS, and that's been around forever. That's what we started with, and it's time tested and true and super useful for schools. You only have one database of record, which is so important on campus. The other is the Blackbaud billing management integration, which is much newer and fresher, and that's where the charges are that are collected in the own owed in point of sale will be imported into billing management and charged for later. We do offer single sign on, so parents can use their Blackbaud account to sign into my kids spending. We have a tuition management export, so that's a formatted export, but it's not automated through API like billing management is, which is one of the huge benefits of working with billing management as it's the most fresh and go forward solution for Blackbaud. And then we have a push of data to FE NXT on the GL. And then finally, we do offer an integration to Blackbaud merchant services, which is now called Blackbaud integrate integrated payments. I found that out today, but it's good to know. You can use your Blackbaud integrate integrated payments account to fund the student student account student accounts through MyKid spending. So I have, like, a couple quick visualizations. This one's really simple. This is where we take the student information from the SIS and put it into Odin, and that populates patrons, making everything much simpler and easy to use. And then here's the Blackbaud billing management integration where charges from ODIN will be pushed into billing management. And, yeah, again, this is what people use for a declining or, excuse me, inclining balance solution. For declining balance, this is more information on the Blackbaud integrated payments integration that we have. So, basically, if the school has a a black, BBIP account, they can use that, as the mid on MyKids spending so that when parents fund the account, it goes through the school's account, and, it shows up as the school on the statement. We'll go ahead and rebate you the merchant fees, and, you can you can use your your Blackbaud account to to fund fund MyKids spending. So I think, it was awesome that Seth was here. We all love Seth. Everybody who knows Seth loves Seth. And Berwick is really, a a great example of, an Oden school because they use both inclining and declining balance. So, honestly, the vast majority of our schools use only one. But as Seth said, they have funded accounts where kids can spend at the snack snack bar. And then when they go to the school store, those charges are recorded and then billed for later. So for for declining balance, they actually do use Blackbaud integrated payments to fund the accounts. For inclining balance, they use our API export to billing management. And then, the last slide I have here is something that is fun to share. This is something that, my team and I have been working on with Julia and the team at Blackbaud. But this is where you can see in the Blackbaud parent portal a tile that will have my kids spending. So we're trying to make this as integrated as possible so that the experience is seamless for the school and the the users there, but also very importantly for the parents. So, you know, with single sign on and this future tile in the Blackbaud account, we're going to have a really seamless experience for for all the parties, at the school. So that's what I have for everybody. I'm gonna. pass it back to Elizabeth now. Thanks, Mark. Really appreciate you joining us and showing us all of that goodness. Alright. Well, I'm sure your heads are spinning, but wanted to just remind everybody to check out the docs area. We've got Berwick's customer story. Again, thank you to Seth for sharing that story live. There's nothing quite like it. And last but not least, I just wanted to give everyone a reminder that we are so thrilled to bring back the k twelve user conference. It will be in Boston, July. We just announced yesterday that Peter Barron will be one of our keynote speakers. For those that have been Blackbaud customers for a while, Peter is very well known from the Whipple Hill days long ago and is just a really great thought leader and school partner now with this company Moonshot OS. So we're really excited about that. Early bird registration is open through March 10. We have group discounts available. This is the learning event of the year for our k twelve schools. There is unmatched networking. You'll get to see our wonderful k twelve advisory board, our product managers, leaders, and it's just a really great opportunity to take your learning and your connections to the next level. So I encourage everybody to please check out the information there in the docs area. If you have any questions, please reach out. And without further ado, I'll give everyone a few minutes back in their day. Thanks to all of our presenters today, and we hope everybody has a great rest of your day. Thanks.