The Composite Financial Index (CFI) is a sophisticated tool designed to help you think strategically about your school's overall financial health and communicate succinctly about it with school leaders. Employed by higher education institutions for decades, the CFI produces a complete picture of your institution's financial strengths and weaknesses in a single score that is based on four underlying core ratios. To develop the CFI, experts with the Big 4 accounting firm KPMG ran longitudinal models on data from over 250 colleges. From this, the team developed a scoring scale, metric scale and weighting scale. NBOA offers the CFI tool as an Excel workbook, or, NBOA members with sufficient data in NBOA’s data reporting and analysis tool, BIIS, may view their CFI scores in the CFI Calculator report in BIIS. NBOA's work with the CFI is the result of an important partnership with the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), in conjunction with CFI co-creators, Phil Tahey and Ron Saluzzo.
In addition to learning from a variety of curated resources including videos, articles, recorded webinars, case studies and discussion boards, you will establish a national learning community of peers with whom you can continue to explore the concepts discussed in the course and stay connected throughout your independent school careers. This network will be beneficial as you learn:
This course is offered in partnership with One Schoolhouse.
In the first week of the course, you will learn about the genesis and benefits of the Composite Financial Index. You will be introduced to the four core ratios and how they are calculated and used in discussion of the index. Also in this week you will calculate a five-year trend of the core ratios, or review the calculation provided for you in BIIS, and develop a narrative of the trends and factors/actions the school has taken that are affecting the trends.
In the second week of the course you will learn about the strength factors and weighting schema for calculating the CFI and how to calculate your own CFI five-year trend. You will also hear how other schools have used the CFI to reframe their strategic financial conversations, along with learning how the use of debt in the independent school sphere differs from that in higher education and how debt influences the calculation of your CFI. Participants will post a summary of their school’s five-year trend and whether it validates or contradicts what you know about your school’s financial health.
NBOA is recognized by SHRM to offer SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP professional development credits (PDCs). For more information about certification or recertification, please visit www.shrmcertification.org.
NBOA is a recognized provider of recertification credits. HR Certification Institute® pre-approved this program for credits towards aPHR™, PHR®, PHRca®, SPHR®, GPHR®, PHRi™ and SPHRi™ recertification.
Up to 35 participants
This course was extremely helpful in quantifying the financial health of my school. It provided tools to not only analyze the impact that past decisions and actions had on our Composite Financial Index, but to see what impact future decisions and actions might have on our financial health. Well worth the time and money!
Marietta Wahl
Chief Financial Officer, Oak Grove Lutheran School
