Client Profile
El Dorado School District is located in El Dorado, Arkansas, some 120 miles south of Little Rock. It has eight schools with more than 400 certified staff members and over 4,200 students. The district implemented TeacherWallet, a ClassWallet solution, across five of its schools in 2019.
Challenge
El Dorado School District struggled with a cumbersome system that required upwards of five people in Administration to process teacher reimbursements. Each reimbursement took over 20 minutes per transaction to process, costing the district some 650 man-hours per year. The District needed a better solution.
Solution
The El Dorado Public School District launched TeacherWallet in eight days during the 2019-2020 fiscal year. Teachers made day-to-day purchases through a simple, convenient desktop or mobile user interface, affording maximum control and fraud-risk mitigation in a completely paperless, cashless and automated manner.
Impact
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Teacher satisfaction improved by removing the worry of reimbursements and out-of-pocket purchases.
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Workload volume plummeted: The number of transactions dropped from 1,544 to a mere 10.
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Processing requisitions time dropped from 648 hours to just 16, providing a 90% cost decrease.
Challenges
The El Dorado School District was saddled with a complicated system for reimbursing teachers for their yearly state-mandated allocations of $500. Teachers had to draft paper requisitions and attach receipts that required the approval of anywhere from three to five people in the administration.
Once a requisition finally reached the district’s finance team, a unique 21-digit code corresponding to the teacher had to be manually entered for each requisition, resulting in an estimated average processing time of 24 minutes per transaction. Most of the 1,500+ transactions the team processed during the 2018-2019 fiscal year were small transactions of $15 or less, costing the finance team more than 650 hours of labor and an additional $16,345.41 in accounting expenses alone.
When Shelley Pruitt, chief financial officer for the El Dorado School District, saw her team of six using their combined 60+ years of experience navigating such an unnecessarily overcomplicated process, she knew there had to be a more efficient way of dealing with teacher reimbursements.”
Solution
The El Dorado Public School District launched TeacherWallet in the 2019-2020 fiscal year with immediate success. Teachers could now make day-to-day purchases with their $500 state-mandated allotments through a simple, convenient user interface, affording maximum control and fraud-risk mitigation in a completely paperless, cashless and automated manner.
Once the district decided to implement TeacherWallet, they took the system live just eight days later, instantly simplifying the transaction process for 122 teachers across five schools. Since the solution was implemented before the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to pivot to remote learning, TeacherWallet was also used by teachers to order supplies directly to their homes.
Impact
TeacherWallet made it easier for teachers to manage funds with “mind-blowing efficiency,” said Pruitt. The solution enabled teachers to spend their $500 on classroom supplies without worrying about reimbursements or potentially having to pay out-of- pocket. It also allowed the district to easily track spending, increasing accountability and auditability, while reducing time spent on back-end accounting.
After the implementation of TeacherWallet, the number of transactions from the previous year dropped from 1,544 to a mere 10. The number of hours spent processing requisitions was dramatically reduced from 648 hours to just 16. The total cost of requisition processing decreased to $1,644 for the 2019-2020 fiscal year—a 90% drop. This cost includes the cost of TeacherWallet implementation, which delivered a rapid ROI.
El Dorado School District plans to expand the use of TeacherWallet across other schools in the district and use it for special education materials and management of restricted funds.
TeacherWallet was an undeniable success for both teachers and administrators, empowering educators to use the funds allotted to them with ease, increasing tracking and accountability in a paperless environment and drastically reducing the district’s previous accounting costs. One year later, TeacherWallet has proven to be the right choice for the El Dorado School District.
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6200
Schools
19
State Agencies
4.1M
Students Served