Overview

With more than 101,000 students across 118 schools, the School District of Lee County is the ninth largest in Florida and the 32nd largest in the country. But for most of its history, the district had no single, current view of its money. Each school’s books lived on their own, and seeing the whole picture took serious manual effort.

Michael Gatewood Jr., Director of Internal Auditing, and Kenneth Revels, Business Process Analyst and a former bookkeeper of nearly 17 years, each played a key role in Lee County’s move to SchoolCash in 2023. The team set up SchoolCash in three months, launching a month ahead of schedule.

The Challenge

Disconnected software with no shared accounts or vendor database

Lee County’s bookkeepers were working in outdated, standalone, DOS-based software that wasn’t connected to a central system. There was no shared chart of accounts and no central vendor database. The records were spread everywhere, which made even routine lookups a slog. As Kenneth puts it, “Trying to go through that list was brutal.”

Because nothing connected, district reporting meant compiling and re-entering data from every individual location. And the old software had started to fail. It was crashing all the time, and the team was overdue for something new.

Payments were also a gap. Historically, about 90% of the funds the district collected came in as cash and checks, while parents kept asking for a way to pay by card.

The Solution

One platform for accounting, payments, and the school store

The team centralized Lee County’s chart of accounts and vendor database in SchoolCash, so district reporting no longer depended on pulling data school by school. Moving the vendor list alone was, in Kenneth’s words, “an incredible improvement.” The platform also gave the district a way to process credit card payments, which parents had been asking for.

This opened up something school staff didn’t have before: an online store where families could browse items (like spirit wear) to see what’s available and then buy it directly.

“School-based staff members are excited that the catalog can be posted to an online store, allowing families the opportunity to see what’s available.

I wish we had this when I was operating a school store. We would have made a lot more money.”

– Kenneth Revels, Business Process Analyst

The Results

A trusted partnership and a successful launch – a full month early!

The team set schools up in just three months. When the old software’s problems escalated, they accelerated the rollout and still finished about a month ahead of schedule, running SchoolCash largely out of the box. Lee County’s Chief Technology Officer was struck by how fast the implementation went.

Support kept pace throughout. When a question came up, someone from KEV was there to walk the team through it, and when their rep didn’t have an answer on the spot, she found someone who did. For Kenneth, that responsiveness stood out against years of silence from the previous provider.

When we asked him what advice he’d give to other districts, Kenneth said this: “KEV has been on top of everything. The whole time I was a bookkeeper, I never heard from the previous software provider at all. As I said to our CFO: you need to buy SchoolCash.”