NBOA President and CEO
Several years ago, NBOA’s custom data analysis platform, BIIS (pronounced “biz”), was developed by business officers for business officers, as an exclusive membership benefit. NBOA member schools committed to the highest levels of data integrity to ensure effective data analysis and for the betterment of the entire business officer community. In return, NBOA committed to reviewing the data to ensure that it meets the highest standard of validity and reliability.
In building this platform, we learned that collaboration among all school business leadership would be more effective if financial and operations data could be gathered in a single source. With this in mind, last year we announced a partnership with NAIS, on collection efforts for financial operations data. As a result, this year for the first time, all NBOA member schools were asked to enter data in NAIS’s DASL platform, knowing it would populate and inform reporting in both DASL and BIIS. I am pleased to share BIIS opened for data reporting last week on Monday, January 10.
The collaboration has proven quite successful. More than 800 NBOA member schools entered their 2020-21 school year (FY21) financial operations data in DASL between October and November of last year. Following both the automated data review process in DASL and the rigorous manual scrubbing process conducted by NBOA-hired former and active business officers, BIIS now has 629 clean and complete school data sets available for benchmarking and industry analysis. This is double the number of schools with complete and clean data from last year. This larger data set benefits NBOA member schools and the independent school community in two important ways:
First, schools with data in BIIS now have access to powerful reporting tools to inform key business operations, including:
- Salary benchmarking: Use BIIS' easy-to-navigate tools and charts to benchmark compensation data for key business office positions.
- Strategic planning: Use the Composite Financial Index (CFI) calculator in BIIS to think strategically about your school’s overall financial health and communicate succinctly about it with school leaders (available for schools with at least two years of data in BIIS).
- Staffing benchmarking: This may be of particular interest this year, as student/staffing ratios may have changed at your school during the pandemic. View your school's NBOA Financial Dashboard in BIIS to examine trends in enrollment, staffing, income and expenses.
- Tracking your school's tuition discount rate: Use ratios in BIIS to calculate indicators vital to your school's long-term financial health, including total tuition discount rate and percent of tuition discount funded by operating expenses.
With clean data from more than 600 independent schools in the platform, your ability to benchmark against compatible schools from across the country is greatly enhanced. Create your own peer group to further customize the benchmarking tools. Slice the data by school type, size, location and more, and distill it into accurate and meaningful graphs to share with fellow school leaders and your board of trustees to help you navigate your school's "next normal."
Click here to access your BIIS reporting tools.
If you have questions about BIIS, please contact NBOA’s director, research and data analysis, Elizabeth Dabney, at research@nboa.org.
Furthermore, NBOA now has a significantly larger data set from which to analyze and report important school year results and industry trends, and to better forecast opportunities and challenges ahead for independent schools. Look for enhanced reporting and relevant analysis this year and beyond. This includes published research reports, for example, the “2022 NBOA Financial State of the Industry,” available next month, and BIIS analysis in Net Assets magazine, Net Assets NOW newsletter, NBOA’s social media channels, and via a variety of NBOA and partner presentations and webinars throughout the year.
An important goal of this collaboration with NAIS is to eliminate duplicate data entry for schools and to reduce survey fatigue, which has impacted business officers and business office staff for years. I firmly believe this collaboration achieved this goal and saved participating NBOA member schools time, energy and resources as well. If your school did not participate this year, make it a point to dedicate the time — a matter of hours, not weeks and months! — to be part of DASL/BIIS financial operations data collection for the benefit of your own school and the entire NBOA community.
So much has changed in our environment since we initially developed BIIS. I firmly believe that what we thought we knew before the pandemic, may need to be rethought in the years to come. It's clear that data will be key to illuminating the path forward for independent schools. Add BIIS tools to your toolkit and unlock a new future for your school.
Follow President and CEO Jeff Shields @shieldsNBOA.
