Finance

I had the opportunity to meet with the Finance Department today to learn about how they use the Student Inofrmation System and needs that they may have in the kind of data reports that they might need to pull from a potential system.

As with each of these sessions, I presented them with this slidedeck


And here was their wish list and particular items of note:

• SAP Interoperability
• When a student is admitted to Harker, Admissions sends a Contract to the parents, and then the parents need to submit a deposit and (potentially) the ACH form. The receipt of those items goes through the SIS and informs Finance of their next steps. What kinds of systems are in existence for other SISs that allows the notifications of forms and deposits of this sort?
• How are log records accessed (who did what and when?)
• Is there a billing portal? How easy, or difficult, is it to use?
• What kind of data control is there? For instance, in our current system, if a parent is changing their address and accidentally types their name into the zip code field, our system does not catch this error, and allows it. This information is then pulled in reports and has to be hand-checked before importing into Financial systems (SAP).
• How easy, or difficult, is it to pull or create different demographic data reports?