NBOA President and CEO
It’s widely understood that independent school business officers are the keepers of their school’s data. They enter it, download it, interpret it and report it. Thanks to a data collection partnership between NAIS’s DASL and NBOA’s BIIS platforms, this responsibility is now faster and easier to undertake than ever before. As a community, we are entering a new chapter in data collection, analysis and reporting for independent schools.
A partnership of this magnitude requires significant time, money and a mutual commitment of board and staff leadership. I would wager some of our members thought it would never happen. Now the time has arrived.
It will help ALL independent schools, large and small, day and boarding, from Orlando to Seattle, share key findings, provide more context for decisions, and ultimately, gain a greater understanding of particular challenges and potential solutions.
DASL is now open until November 19 for all NAIS and NBOA member schools to enter their business operations data. The data you enter on behalf of your school today will be checked by numerous algorithms in the DASL platform and further reviewed by a team of NBOA “scrubbers” to ensure all data in the system is clean. The combined resources of NAIS and NBOA will help ensure that the data that the business officer, head of school, other school administrators and board of trustees use is accurate and reliable.
This is just the beginning. The partnership will also allow you and your school leadership team to look at the same set of data points and make the best decisions for your school with regard to benchmarking salaries for key business office positions, developing your school’s strategic plan, making staffing decisions in response to student enrollment, tracking your school’s tuition discount rate, and other financial levers that impact your school. You have the tools to make data-informed decisions with confidence and help ensure your school’s long-term financial health.
After your data is reviewed and available for reporting, likely in December, take advantage of a variety of resources available to NBOA member schools exclusively in BIIS:
- The NBOA Financial Dashboard helps you identify, understand and monitor the financial indicators that have the greatest impact on your school's financial health. View a sample report.
- The Composite Financial Index (CFI) Calculator helps you think strategically about your school's overall financial health, communicate succinctly about it with school leaders and strategize your school’s financial future. View a sample report.
- Financial benchmarking with peer schools helps you navigate the “new normal.”
- Key financial ratios, based upon 50 leading financial indicators formerly used by Moody’s credit analysis, can facilitate important financial sustainability conversations vital to the health of our schools.
Finally, the opportunity for NAIS and NBOA to collect, review, analyze and report business operations data from more than 1,000 independent schools will provide even more benefits. It will help ALL independent schools, large and small, day and boarding, from Orlando to Seattle, share key findings, provide more context for decisions, and ultimately, gain a greater understanding of particular challenges and potential solutions.
The success of this partnership ultimately depends on you. With your audited financials at the ready, plan to spend just a few hours to enter 100+ business operations data points in DASL by November 19. Forget what you know — or think you know — about DASL and BIIS. A new day has dawned, and we are ready, willing and eager to serve you and your schools better together.
Follow President and CEO Jeff Shields @shieldsNBOA.
From Net Assets NOW, November 9, 2021. Read past issues of CEO Notebook.
