By Debby Reichel, Chief Financial Officer

Although CA has always been know as a tech school on the student-side of things, the business operations have taken a little longer to catch up. Over the years, we have used a variety of platforms pieced together to help us get work done.  Integration wasn’t a word you would use to describe our technology workflow.

But all that is changing!  We have been working hard over the past two years to catch up, and I am happy to report that lots of dedication and hard work on the part of the Business Operations team has yielded some amazing results thus far:

• This year, our student billing moved to a web-based platform that allows parents to manage all of their tuition, fees and incidental charges from one place. Parents also have the option of auto-drafting payments each month from either their bank account or credit card.  Bye-bye paper statements and paper checks!
• We put in place a new web-based POS (point of sale) platform in the Campus Store that now allows us to email a receipt in real time to either the parent or student; no more waiting until month-end to find out what new Charger Corner treasures have been acquired.
• We have implemented the School Dude platform (funny name, great software!) to allow us to electronically submit and track technology and facilities requests, allowing our IS and Facilities teams to more effectively and efficiently meet the many ongoing needs of a campus of our size. In addition, this platform also allows us to schedule facilities, avoiding the dreaded double-booking of a conference room!
• SAGE Dining, our amazing dining services partner, has launched their “Touch of SAGE” mobile app (available for both Android and iOS) that allows our community to access the menu, view nutritional information, create menus filtered for allergens, flag favorite foods and send feedback (yummy and not so yummy) to Chef Sam and his team.

We’re not done…here’s what we are working on for the coming year:

• A new Human Resource Information System (HRIS) that will automate and digitize many of our human resources functions including payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, open benefits enrollment and records maintenance.
• An expense processing platform integrated into our accounting software that will allow us to process payment and credit card transactions completely online as well as electronically store supporting documents. Bye bye boxes in the basement!
• A budgeting platform integrated with our accounting system that will allow budget officers to create their budgets online and see financial information in real time.
• A Charger Corner e-commerce site tied to our new campus store POS system. Now grandma will be able to buy that Charger t-shirt from the comfort of her own couch.

Do you have any additional ideas? Or any feedback on what we have already been put in place?  I’d love to hear your thoughts-please share them with me at deborah_reichel@caryacademy.org