From Stock Picks to School Budgets: My Deep Dive into Educational Finance
I’ll be honest—I’ve always been a bit of a finance nerd. While other people were checking social media over their morning coffee, I was scrolling through market reports and tweaking my investment portfolio. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching numbers tell a story, whether it’s tracking a stock’s performance over time or researching trends on where to invest next.
But here’s something that never really hit me until recently: while I’m busy tinkering with my school 403(b) and debating the merits of index funds versus ETF’s, financial professionals in schools across the country are juggling budgets that would make my investment decisions look like pocket change. They’re not just managing money—they’re orchestrating complex financial ecosystems that directly impact whether students get new digital textbooks, teachers get raises, or that leaky roof finally gets fixed.
Getting a School CFO’s Perspective
Enter CFO Nancy Greene, who works in the finance office at Pine Crest School (FL). Unlike my relatively meager attempts to buy low and sell high, she navigates an intricate web of enrollment projections, tuition management, fundraising campaigns, and budget forecasting—all while utilizing various software systems that provide her with real-time data that could shift financial strategies in an instant.
As our Blackbaud K–12 Advisory Board expands to include voices from the different offices on campus, I realize I needed to better understand how the financial side of education really works. So, I sat down with Nancy, one of our newest members, to explore how modern school finance operates. And honestly? It’s way more sophisticated (and impressive) than anything I’ve encountered in my years of personal investing. This was our conversation:
The Impact of System Integration
Austin: I’m curious. You have all these integrated systems feeding you data from enrollment, tuition management, fundraising, and your SIS. How much does that change the game when you’re putting together things like budgets and trying to forecast what next year might look like?
Nancy: Having integrated systems is a huge component to making what we do more efficient. I love what is happening in the software industry—including our entire Blackbaud suite—as they work to integrate AI into their products. We have found it equally important to utilize AI outside of those solutions, to manage and project things that are all dependent on one another to make a financial budget work.
Enrollment is key to what we do, so if we are going to have sound budgeting and forecasting decisions, we need to leverage these sophisticated integrations. For example, we are working on building predictive analysis into our financial model. We can incorporate both internal and external sources to our model to better predict the next 5 to 10 years. We are in a very competitive market, and our consumers are changing. Affording life in South Florida is concerning for our families. We need to be in tune with what is happening and what is projected to happen.
Enrollment as a Key Driver
Austin: Let’s talk enrollment numbers. I imagine those admission and enrollment trends are a bit of a crystal ball for financial planning, right? When you see how many kids are actually coming versus how many you hoped for—and what that means for tuition revenue—how much does that reshape everything you’re planning financially? Does that completely change your strategy for the year ahead?
Nancy: Absolutely. Enrollment is a key driver. We have a really talented Admissions Director with whom we work very closely. In addition, we have a very large enrollment, roughly 2700 students. We need to follow trends in our market, track statistics on who is moving in and out of the area, analyze demographics, and evaluate the financial capability of our potential students. Integrating predictive analysis into our financial model will help us have a real understanding of what is projected for our marketplace and provide us with information on potential trends. Knowing that our external predictive data is only refreshed in intervals, we still need to do our own intel and lay it over our internal models as well.
Connecting Advancement and the Business Office
Austin: Here’s something I never would have considered: When your fundraising data is connected to your main financial records, how does that influence the really big decisions? Like, does a great fundraising year directly impact tuition rates, or allow you to offer more financial aid? How does that all work together?
Nancy: Fundraising definitely contributes to the overall budget and can potentially impact any one of the elements that are in the budget; including but not limited to tuition and financial aid. We have had Blackbaud solutions for quite some time and now have Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT® for advancement and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® in the business office. With our previous school solutions (Senior Systems) we imported the data at each month end, but it is much nicer having it smoothly integrated all within Blackbaud’s system. We have accurate data at all times.
Having ONE connected system that includes the general ledger and the fundraising CRM just made things easier and brought our two departments together—with things like enhanced reporting and accurate gift reconciliation. It improved the relationship between our Advancement and Finance offices. For example, we now understand the “why and how” we each record things. There are differences between GAAP accounting and fundraising accounting and understanding this plays a critical role in understanding the reconciliation process.
Real-Time, Cross-Departmental Reporting
Austin: So, here’s what I’m wondering—does all this live data coming at you from different parts of the school actually make you more agile when things go sideways during the year? Like, can you spot problems early and adjust course, or does having all that information just make everything more complicated?
Nancy: Having accurate, real-time data absolutely allows you to spot problems and adjust. Being able to review variances and trends in a timely manner and address it with managers is critical. If we see things happening, we can make real-time adjustments to budgets. In addition, strategic goals or priorities at schools can shift and we need to be collaborative in our effort to adjust accordingly. When we make these adjustments, departments are not giving up something from their budgets that they won’t see next year. We do zero-based budgeting each year to avoid this. But having real-time access to adjust allows us to be nimbler, allows us to partner and put players in the same room, and helps them understand school-wide priorities.
Austin: Very cool. I bet this happens a lot: You’re in a meeting with admissions and the development folks and everyone’s got their own vision of how things are going. Does being able to generate those cross-departmental reports actually solve that problem? Can you put one report on the table and have everyone working from the same playbook?
Nancy: Yes, most definitely. An example would be our entire Financial Aid process as it is done collaboratively with the members of our admissions team. We pull and share reports on historical data both at a detail level by recipient and from an aggregate perspective from our systems. By having both departments involved in the process, we keep each other ‘in check’. Admissions has extensive knowledge of our families that we may not know as well, and my department’s expertise in financial reporting and historical family financial data and tax information makes sure we are making good decisions for our families and the right decisions for the school. Our cross-departmental reporting provides the big picture so we can talk about priorities and truly understand the impact of decisions.
Bringing Data to the Forefront
Austin: I have to ask: With all these integrated systems giving you data, what has actually moved the needle for you? When you’re planning something big or trying to spot trouble before it hits, are there specific reports or tools that have become your secret weapons? What’s the stuff you’d be lost without?
Nancy: Having the business office included in our Blackbaud solution makes for a lot of efficiency as noted in our conversation about the integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT. However, things like payroll and substitute management sit outside of that solution, so we look to system integration or robotic process automation to integrate those processes. The school’s labor is our biggest cost, so we lean on reports that measure our FTE trends as compared to student enrollment. We ask questions such as “Do we see this ratio increasing? If so, what does class size look like? Have we added additional courses or sections of a course. Has our scheduling changed? Have our class sizes shrunk? Do we need to be more efficient? These considerations are made with the administrative team, but the business office can bring the data to the forefront.
Sometimes we plan for growth, sometimes for stability, and sometimes for a reduction in enrollment. It’s hardest to budget when you are in a stable or enrollment decline projection. My word of caution here is to not match your expense rate of change with your revenue rate of change, as things can shift; be conservative with expense growth that is within your control. We have to deal with many increased costs that are out of our control. You must pay attention; dynamic shifts can happen, leave yourself some room.
Moving Forward with AI
Austin: Awesome. What questions did I forget? Anything you’d like to include or hammer home?
Nancy: I feel that having a comprehensive system that integrates naturally as much as possible is the goal. But with things like payroll, the GL, reporting, managing substitute teachers—there is still not going to be one program that is best for every single need. We are seeing the addition of AI inside our software, which is a great thing, but it won’t solve all the problems we face in the business office. So, how do we still move our entire operations team forward with regards to efficiencies? From my perspective, it’s the additional inclusion of AI outside of these systems that I see the path forward. That’s what I am working towards at Pine Crest.
I feel that I am constantly learning every day. It’s really a blessing to being in such a collaborative industry. I have so many forward-thinking and intelligent colleagues and through sharing I am constantly challenged to consider new ideas, often thinking “Wow, maybe I need to relook at things again.” Or after exploring things “Maybe that solution isn’t for us.” Continuous collaboration and exploration just make us better.
Austin: I couldn’t agree more.
Before we wrap up, any good stock tips? What should my crypto allocation be?
<Awkward Silence>
Nancy: If I had that answer, I wouldn’t be working! 😉
Well, at least I tried.
The Bottom Line: There Is an Unsung Hero Behind Every Success Story
After meeting with Nancy, the main takeaway was not the CFO’s advanced ledgers and analytics, but the understanding that financial decisions should always consider how to best serve our families and students.
She shared a leadership metaphor about gracefully working between “the balcony and the dancefloor.” Stepping back to build predictive models and analyze market forces (The Balcony) and then diving into the details with the admissions team to make financial aid decisions that will impact individual lives (The Dancefloor). Nancy appears to have struck the right balance, something that feels more important than ever.
Oh, and I love a good metaphor.
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Pine Crest uses Blackbaud’s Total School Solution, encompassing enrollment, SIS, LMS, tuition, accounting, and fundraising systems.
Learn more about Nancy, Austin, and our other K–12 Advisory Board members here.
