TEA Winner 2022: Pryor Public Schools, Oklahoma

• Industry: Education
• Tyler Client Since: 2015
• Number of Employees: 400
• Student Enrollment: 2,750
• Tyler Solution: School ERP Pro powered by Infinite Visions®, Content Manager™

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Learn how Pryor Public Schools leveraged technology to reduce manual processes and increase internal controls.

Challenge

Payroll and state reporting can quickly become tiresome and complex for school districts. In the case of Finance Director Jason Johnson and the staff at Pryor Public Schools, this became apparent when their software wasn’t meeting the needs of their growing district.

Due in large part to exponential growth in the city’s industrial park, Pryor Public Schools has seen their general fund budget increase from approximately $16 million to $30 million in the last three years alone. Coupled with an accounting system that offered limited functionality and required large amounts of data entry, Johnson and his staff realized they needed a long-term solution.

“We’re in a growing stage,” Johnson explained. “The system we were using was not a full accounting system. It’s not a bad system and the schools it’s working well for — it’s good for what they need. It was really designed for schools that don’t have a lot of personnel, or don’t have staff with much accounting or bookkeeping knowledge, so a lot of the system was data entry. We thought we needed to look for an accounting system with more capabilities.”

Solution

Looking is exactly what they did, eventually settling on School ERP Pro [powered by Infinite Visions®] and Content Manager™.

“When we started down the road [of looking for new software], our thoughts were, ‘We’re really frustrated with the system we have,’” Johnson said. “We took the time to set priorities and goals for what we hoped to accomplish. A couple of other vendors had similar capabilities, but for the pricing and what we wanted to do, Tyler was by far the best option for us.”

Results

Today, the district’s new software has alleviated many of their pain points, from data entry and reporting to system security and support. Previously, much of the district’s dissatisfaction centered around data transparency and accuracy — issues apparent to the finance department’s experienced staff.

“Where financial accounting was concerned, a very big part of the frustration laid in the inability to see the process rules utilized to perform various functions,” Johnson said. “We would put data into the system and the results we would get back weren’t what we were expecting or what we knew we should get.”

The inability to trust their data also created an abundance of manual work for Business Manager Kristi Scalf.

“I would figure something out for payroll by hand and the number wouldn’t match with our accounting system, and it was a struggle and a fight to figure out why,” said Scalf, an employee of Pryor Public Schools for 28 years. “There was a lot in the background that was being run by the system, but we had no insight into what the program was doing. We were finding we were doing more and more things manually.”

With School ERP Pro, the district has unprecedented insight into their financial information and the ability to be more transparent to their stakeholders through detailed reports. Since they were integral in the configuration and implementation process, the days of not understanding how the software is running are in the past.

“The ability to assign roles and privileges with more granularity has greatly improved internal controls,” Johnson said. “Even though everyone in our office is of utmost integrity, the separation of duties we have been able to implement is great and makes the auditing process easier and more transparent. And the option to use electronic approval processes has saved time and ensured timely approval.”

So, how does their software compare to their previous vendor?

“The old system was pretty much data entry,” Johnson said. “Tyler has completely changed the entire way we function, so in a lot of ways, it doesn’t compare at all.”