NetSuite for Education: Maximizing your operational efficiency!
NetSuite for Education: Maximizing your operational efficiency!
The advent of technology in every industry sector has led to efficient processes. The evolving demands and the high competition to please customers drive the need for more robust technologies – Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions.
The education sector also intends to become technology-focused to meet students’ learning needs. It requires ERP to streamline operations and generate performance insights. ERP helps manage all aspects of educational institutions to make them a success.
And NetSuite for Education makes your operational ride better and more successful. The solution drives efficiency for your education business – a national university, a globally ranked educational business, or an online Edtech startup.
A NetSuite education consultant can help you with its implementation and customization to manage your needs. It also helps integrate NetSuite with other systems and trains employees on the optimal use of the solution.
Before coming to this conclusion, let’s explore the challenges of an educational institute. We check out how NetSuite for Education makes your education profession more productive and effective.
Challenges Faced by an Educational Institute
The following are the challenges of an educational institute:
1. Schools, colleges, and universities carry out manual processes. Even if the processes are automatic, every process operates on disconnected systems. Such operations lead to duplication of work, time wastage, and errors.
2. Educational institutes have to manage several processes – admission of students, payment of fees, designing the curriculum, managing the teaching staff, executing courses, and many more. The need to execute more processes means more laws and regulations to follow.
3. Aligning your school administration process with the goals you want to achieve is a test. You want to impart quality education and reduce the stress of administrative work on teachers. So, you need to connect your back-office processes with frontline procedures.
4. With schools in many locations or running several courses, many financial processes exist. You need to track the payment of fees on-time, pending fees, and applicable penalties. You must also consider donations, equipment expenditures, staff salaries, and other costs. Thus, the need is to manage many financial procedures for legal compliance.
5. Keeping a tab on all your expenses and capital expenditures is daunting. These include salaries to permanent and temporary staff, equipment, supplies for teaching, playgrounds, capital expenditure, and technology. You need to ensure close monitoring of these accounts to avoid erratic behaviour.
6. A large amount of data exists for any educational institution. Data on students, teachers, exams, courses, books, schedules, etc. If this data is on paper or in different spreadsheets, losing them is a strong possibility. Or you may need to duplicate the work when you need more than two data points for further analysis. Without an effective system, all this data is a mess.
7. Institutions desire communication and collaboration between departments for effective operations. For this, you need a single data source to keep all departments on the same page. Everyone must have the same, up-to-date information to determine the following action. But having a central repository of data is a challenge for educational institutions.
8. You can understand a school or college’s performance basis its key indicators. But, without a robust technology system, it isn’t easy to track these metrics. Manual or spreadsheet use makes it tough to track metrics, such as:
- Graduation rate
- Grant money
- Student-to-faculty ratio
- Research grants
- Per cent of students on aid
- Cost per student
- Faculty and staff retention rate
- Number of training sessions per year
- Student attendance rate
Features and Benefits of NetSuite for the Education Sector
NetSuite for Education resolves all the challenges mentioned above. It is a unified solution for all your business needs. It keeps all aspects of your education business connected to ensure quality outcomes for all stakeholders.
Financial transparency
NetSuite for Education links your back-office billing processes with the accounting procedures to stay compliant. The automation of accounting processes reduces human errors and creates transparent workflows. Automated payment processes (electronic payments) also ensure secure, painless, and efficient payments.
The financial management benefits of NetSuite for Education include the following:
- It helps in generating complete accounting details to lead to successful account closing.
- You can have complete insights at every moment based on pre-built accounting capabilities.
- NetSuite integrates finances with sales and services to help you make and execute decisions.
- It helps you manage donations and funds and their collection processes.
- The marketing capability of NetSuite helps you with campaigns, newsletters, and communication for these donation and fundraising events.
- You can generate customisable reports on financial performance for accurate and quick reporting in compliance with applicable accounting standards.
- Accessibility to role-based dashboards and real-time metrics enables you to identify pain points and improve performance.
Real-time reporting
Education institutions need to follow many legal and regulatory requirements. Also, there are several sources of income and expenditure avenues to track.
NetSuite for Education gives complete visibility of all data in real time. Such clear views of data help you make data-driven and informed decisions. Audit trails ensure compliance at all levels, including complete reporting. The dashboards and customised reports enable you to track KPIs and improve operations.
Data management happens across the institution, leading to an integrated data view. NetSuite for Education has in-built analysis tools to derive insights and make decisions. Besides reporting monetary values, you can produce reports on non-monetary factors.
These insightful reports and business intelligence make compliance achievable and a smoother ride. Thus, you can minimise your business risks and have more transparency with stakeholders. The ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to data and reports lets you run your business 24*7.
Operational effectiveness
One of the critical goals for an educational institution is streamlining its operations. Something on the lines of a smooth process of:
- Student enrolment for courses
- Tracking assignments
- Tracking student attendance
- Scheduling teachers’ classes
- Scheduling courses for students
- Scheduling examinations
- Tracking student grades and marks
If you use old, outdated systems, you compromise your productivity. But NetSuite for Education lets you stay up-to-date and timely with every process because of automation. You can value your staff’s time and manage schedules for classes accordingly. You can track student attendance and grades on NetSuite.
You can even set up the best campaigns for your fundraising events to get the largest funding and donations. You can standardise the donation and grants prospecting process. It eases recurring requests, membership billing, payment schedules, and transaction management.
NetSuite defines standard procedures for every process in every department across the institution. Data management helps you analyse, make charts and graphs, and create visualisations. Thus, it enables data-driven decision-making to benefit the students with better experiences.
Comprehensive human resources management
NetSuite for Education helps you manage the recruitment process for your institute. Be it inviting applications, managing the applicant database, interviewing, offering jobs, and orientation – NetSuite handles it all. Thus, you get the best permanent and temporary staff to manage courses and teaching.
Along with human resources management, NetSuite for Education handles payrolls as well. The NetSuite solution manages all payroll, be it permanent teachers, visiting faculties, administrative staff, or other team members. Thus, the people management capabilities of NetSuite aid in managing human resources and payrolls.
The common data source keeps teachers and staff up-to-date with news and processes. They can also manage their teaching schedules and students’ attendance and marks. Thus, the data remains secure, organised, and at easy accessibility to teachers.
The update of regulations, labour laws, and taxation requirements on the NetSuite system is helpful to the staff. They know the details of their remunerations, taxes, and other deductions. Thus, the education institute can stay compliant with all regulations and laws.
Streamlined purchasing processes
An educational institution has many expenses to track and control. You must get quotes from several suppliers, approvals, and make payments. Automating these processes makes them faster, smoother, error-free, and compliant.
NetSuite for Education provides a single purchasing system to integrate all processes. With integrated accounts, you get a clear view of the purchasing process – from selecting a supplier to making payments. Thus, you have complete control and clear visibility of the workflows.
The NetSuite solution helps in the following:
- Forecasting expenses and preparing budgets
- Managing quotes from various suppliers
- Segregate costs for equipment, capital, teaching materials, etc.
- Creating orders based on templates
- Automating order sending and approval process
- Making timely payments by setting alerts
- Tracking invoices, receipts, and pending payments
Thus, the single system for purchasing information defines standardised procedures. You can have complete visibility of expenses and analyse your spending patterns. It also helps identify strategic vendors for repeat orders and negotiate better prices and terms and conditions.
eCommerce process management
Universities offering online courses need smooth management of their curriculum and execution. So, they need a solution to manage the relevant inventory for these courses. It includes students, materials, examinations, teaching staff, and support services.
NetSuite for Education helps educational institutions offering online courses in the following ways:
- Managing email and phone enquiries
- Routing these enquires to a single, central database for required follow-up and confirmation
- Creating an online store for courses and their details
- Integrating with the marketing team for effective advertising strategies
- Adding payment gateways for effecting course fees and other contributions from several sources
- Tracking orders for courses, delivery of the same, and feedback from students
- Tracking the distribution of course materials to students through shipping, delivery, and returns records
Global management
NetSuite is a unified solution combining your back office with a student-facing interface. It generates efficient processes for students, teachers, and other staff. All this is easy when your school or college is in one city.
But NetSuite for Education can manage many units present in different locations. It helps you stay compliant with local and global laws. Thus, your global expansion plan takes shape with NetSuite for Education.
Other benefits include:
- It enables financial consolidation to get an overall idea of your business performance.
- It manages student records – enrolment, attendance, courses, marks, and other details.
- The solution helps you manage the campus and high-quality facilities in all locations.
- You can optimise the use of the building, construction of classrooms, accessibility to other facilities, and arrange other assets like laboratory equipment.
- It helps you manage your business despite differences in reporting, taxation, currencies, languages, and regulations.
Dedicated portals
NetSuite for Education ensures a portal for students, teachers, and parents.
Students can access the student portal to access and track their performance. Students can track fees, assignments, courses, and teachers. You can find details on health status, extracurricular activities, etc.
Students can receive emails and SMS on exams or sudden changes in classes. They can also connect with other students for the same online course. Thus, the student portal helps students collaborate on projects, discussions, and exam preparations.
Similarly, you can create dedicated portals for parents and teachers on NetSuite for Education.
- The Parents’ portal will give information on fee schedules, student performance grades, and other details.
- The Teachers’ portal will have assignments, exam results, performance remarks, syllabus, courses, schedules, and other details.
Thus, every stakeholder stays up-to-date with information relevant to their role in the education ecosystem.
Why must Cloudiotech be your preferred NetSuite Education Consultant?
All these benefits combined can help you modernise your education workflows in your institution. You enhance the management of your finances, human resources, marketing, reporting, and purchasing. It helps you scale your institute and manage its growth throughout its lifecycle.
Such a high-quality ERP system ensures quick and easy management of your operations. It leads to a rise in the focus of senior management, teachers, and staff on education. Thus, you do what you are good at while NetSuite for Education achieves operational efficiencies.
Cloudiotech is a top-ranked NetSuite partner in the UAE and the US. We provide NetSuite implementation, integration, customization, and training services. Our clients get access to our extensive experience in NetSuite implementation in different industries.
Whether you are a school, college, university, or edtech startup, we can customize NetSuite according to your needs. With NetSuite, you can get a complete solution to manage your education programs. It improves your back-office capabilities and integrates with the front end to give excellent results.
Our NetSuite education services are high-quality, outcome-oriented, and tailor-made to your needs, making your operations more efficient and productive. Our NetSuite education consultants guide you through the entire NetSuite adoption lifecycle. We handhold you at every step of this digital transformation for effective results.
Get full marks in managing your operations with Cloudiotech’s support
on the ‘NetSuite for Education’ solution.
