News & Updates

Visual Reports Help You Keep Your School Under Control

By Paolo Dona — Mar 06, 2011

You can never stress it enough, reporting is crucial for any school administration software.

Let’s say you “feel” there are fewer visa students than they used to be… but are you tracking how many of them are enrolled at any given time?

Can you easily compare how much money you’re making today against last year? or last month?

Or can you tell if the online Ad campaign you’ve run has brought you more students?

The only way to precisely answer these and other many questions you have about your business, is to look at the hard data.

Inspecting numbers and data is never easy, so we spent the last few weeks working ona a new reporting system that can help you identify how your school is doing in a more visual way:

The new reporting dashboard gives you an immediate feel of how the school is doing. We measure enrollments, payments, student status and more, and clear up/down arrows tell you what the trends are comparing today’s data with the previous month.

From the example above: Payments are up 14%, which is good, but Visa students are decreasing which may impact long term revenue – this tells you you need a strategy to get more Visa students!

For every metric exposed you can go in deeper detail clicking on the “view details” link, and see changes over time.

Here you see the number of students enrolled over the past three months, along with number of new students and leavers. There’s a dip between Christmas and the first days of the new year, but by the end of January the normal number of students has been restored.

With this sort of data on hand you can for example predict the students behaviour for next year and plan accordingly.

For every graph shown, there is a monthly summary table at the bottom. If you click on the numbers, you will download the list of mentioned students in excel format (eg: click on the number 23 above and you will download the list of students who left in December).

That means that, for example, you can easily:

• Find out who left in December and send a promotion to start school again in January.
• Find who heard about the school via Facebook, and offer a discount if they bring a friend for a trial lesson.
• Find your top three agencies in the last six months and negotiate better rates.

Snapshots of your data are automatically collected by the system, so that you don’t need to save spreadsheets every week or every month, keeping manually track of your figures. You can always ‘go back in time’ and see what the numbers looked like in the past!

The payments report above shows you total amount of payments received between Jan 2009 and today. Note the trend indicators on the right hand side that show you which months improved and which ones got worse compared to the previous one (green/red arrows).

There are a number of reports already available, and with the new reporting engine in place, new ones will be easy to add in the near future.

For example it is now easy to see number of students per contact media, so that you can improve your marketing efforts and see the results over time.

Or students by nationality:

To see the new reports, just click on the “Reports” tab and choose the period you’re interested in using the date selector on the right hand side of the screen.

If your account is new or a new report has just been added, it may take a few days before a meaningful graph is shown, but keep track of your data on a regular basis, and all the hard work will be done by the system for you.

If you want to suggest a new report, or think we can improve an existing one, feel free to drop us an email at info@niftyschool.com.

Happy reporting!