Allovue teamed with a national nonprofit to create a new education finance tool

Baltimore edfintech startup Allovue partnered with a national nonprofit on a new tool designed to help public school officials report finances as required by a federal mandate taking effect this fall.
With the start of the 2018-19 school year, the U.S. government is requiring more detailed financial reporting of expenditures at the school level. The transparency-minded change comes under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which will require reporting of actual per-pupil expenditures by school, where it previously required average spending.
To help the school districts attribute expenditures in a manner that complies with the law, Remington-based Allovue and Education Resource Strategies (ERS) created ACES, short for Attribute Central Expenditures to Schools.  
ESSA technically requires states to report the financial data, but it is often passed on to the agencies at the local level. Typically, centrally-held funds like a district-wide contract or superintendent’s salary aren’t accounted for at the individual school level, said Allovue Sales and Marketing Specialist Autumn Dorsey. The new tool helps district officials calculate and analyze those expenditures, so they don’t have to do so manually, Dorsey said.

Allow us to introduce ACES – a new tool to help your school district or state simplify #ESSA financial reporting and attribute your centrally held expenditures to schools. Learn more on our blog https://t.co/uflSiuJqJC #acesforessa #edfinchat #edfintech #k12 pic.twitter.com/EuNnsGiXt1

— Allovue (@AllovueBalance) July 16, 2018

“ACES is going to simplify the complicated reporting requirements for districts large and small by allowing them to follow an easy, step-by-step approach to attributing central expenditures,” Jess Gartner, CEO of Allovue, said in a statement. “With ACES, districts will be able to see how dollars are flowing to their students today and use this knowledge to facilitate important conversations about resource inequity with their communities.”
ERS, which conducts research in education finance and partners with school districts to help with resource allocation, previously made a version of the tool in Excel. The nonprofit teamed with the design and data team at Allovue over the last six months to “convert the model into a cloud-based tool that now includes easy import/export functionalities, and provides visualizations and insights into the actual resources available at the school level,” Dorsey said.
ACES will be launched in early August.
In April, Allovue announced raising $2 million in new funding, in part to help districts address ESSA.