The increasing use of software applications by district and school staff has many benefits but managing your users across a growing set of applications can cause headaches for district IT teams.

When users have separate accounts in each application, not only do they need to remember these usernames and passwords, but they also must continually change passwords due to various securities policies. If credentials are forgotten or misplaced, time is lost searching or requesting a password reset, which causes users to re-use passwords or select simple passwords that are less secure. This creates issues for IT staff tasked with managing user access to applications. Every time a new employee joins the district and needs access to various applications, IT must configure them in the district systems, as well as each of the applications they will use.

An industry-standard solution to overcome these challenges is implementing Single Sign-On (SSO). This gives users access to multiple applications with a single set of credentials controlled by the district.  With SSO, your district can configure SchoolCash to trust and rely on your systems when authenticating users, and gives you the option to manage permissions and roles centrally.

This simplifies your IT processes for onboarding and offboarding, which allows you to centralize control access to SchoolCash, and provides a better experience for your users by not having to remember additional usernames and passwords.

SchoolCash offers an SSO solution which provides the following benefits:

  • Empowers your IT team with full control over authentication
  • Improved productivity with streamlined workflows
  • Support for organizational compliance standards
  • Eliminates the need for manual changes when SchoolCash users move from one school to another within the district
  • Eliminates the need to manually deactivate SchoolCash users when they leave

SSO is a big win for IT administrators in charge of user access control and role management. With SSO, administrators have full control over system access, including the ability to manage users efficiently based on pre-defined roles governed by the district or school (e.g., district administrator, school bookkeeper, teacher, etc.). These roles and permissions provide role-based control over the functions accessible to staff. Each role includes a set of permissions that defines how much of the system a user can access.

Two SSO modes are available for SchoolCash:

  • Authentication Only
    • A district’s Microsoft Active Directory or Google setup authenticates users but doesn’t assign them roles/bank accounts
  • Authentication Authorization
    • A district’s Microsoft Active Directory or Google setup authenticates users & assigns their roles/bank accounts

We understand that security and efficiencies are top-of-mind for district IT staff, so we’ve developed SchoolCash SSO technology to support the OpenID Connect (OIDC) industry standard. This technology is used to verify the identity of a user and obtain basic user profile information as part of the authentication process when logging into an application. A simpler way to understand OpenID Connect is to think of it as a secure, behind-the-scenes method for a SchoolCash application to quickly contact an identity service, get some user details, and return that information back to the application. This tried-and-tested technology is the industry-wide standard used by many systems, including Google and Microsoft.

Contact your CSM today to learn more.