Okay, welcome back. In this session, what we want to do, this will be your first kind of glimpse into the CollegeAid Pro software technology. So I'll give kind of a quick tour inside of here, inside of the clients. But essentially, you know, this is the interface we're going to be using with families. So essentially, when prospects come in, what the NAFTA Foundation is going to do is that when a college money report is completed, it'll come into a prospect tab, which we'll have here. You won't have the prospect tab in your profile because you'll just have the advisor workstation. We'll kind of be managing all of the folks that go out. So what will happen is when a lead comes in and they have requested a meeting, then we will assign that to you, assign that prospect to you. So once that is clicked, you will get an email, and it'll tell you, hey, so-and-so has been assigned to you. And we've got materials and supporting documentation and templates for you to send out to hopefully get those folks scheduled. So that's kind of what will happen once that is assigned. It'll come into your clients tab. Again, you'll have the email notification. And then as you start to have more clients, you'll also obviously populate what clients are in there. I created a sample client, the project family, sort of college affordability projects, so the project family in here. So again, here's the client interface, kind of a quick tour of what you'll see on your side. Again, the prospects tab will not be there. Home, you'll have some configuration to do, which we'll cover in another session. But you're going to see community and academy. Those are, you know, academy links out to a bunch of video resources that we've developed over the years. There's also biweekly roundtables that you're more than welcome to attend that somebody from the College Aid Pro Team is going to just catch you up on anything going on within financial aid, within the higher education space. So hopefully that's a good spot. And then community is another really good tool. It's actually a Slack-based community where you can dialogue with folks, ask questions, post comments, so there's some different channels in there. So I encourage you to, you know, go ahead and jump in there, especially as you have client meetings and, you know, if we're meeting with folks, a great resource for you to tap into if you've got kind of a, you know, kind of a nitty-gritty question on Pell Grants or what about this family that is divorced and we can't locate the other parent, things like that that are going to come up. Community is a great place to go in there and dialogue with other CAT members. So we've got folks, I believe, in all 50 states, including Alaska and Hawaii. So we've got a pretty broad spectrum of folks in there. So that's hopefully helpful for you, kind of an intro to the College Aid Pro. And then the way the system runs is what we've been talking about so far is basically the facts that need to be entered and what, how the schools figure out what you can afford. Talking about some of the differences between the institutional consensus method and federal. As I said before, the good news is the heavy lifting has been done for you. And as we'll go through and enter facts, you'll see how that really, College Aid Pro is going to do most of the heavy lifting for you so that you can really just focus on getting to helping them figure out how to pay for college, how to shop smarter, all that fun stuff. So we basically go through facts, and that's going to produce the expected payment contributions, which will turn into student aid index come July 1. So be aware, you know, that kind of at this point, the only time to really kind of flip that switch is when the federal government does it, which is July 1. So you'll see some of those changes if you're joining us later here in the summer. But the concepts are still the same. You know, the calculations will change slightly because of the tables and the things that are being used. But essentially, the tables will be in there. They'll be correct in some of the triggers to things like zero EFC calculations modified so that you can get a no assessment of assets. We're going to go through that in a separate module. But, you know, all these things really are baked in so that we have very accurate EFC calculations. So pretty, stand pretty firm on that. So inside of facts, we're going to go through and put in the parent bio. So parent income, assets, student bio, student income and assets. We'll go through those in detail. And then kind of what happens is everything pushes down the left side of your screen. So I call how to pay as the finish line. So we're going to go through each of these tabs in detail to understand what's going on. So facts, then we create a budget. We go shopping for schools. We help people track their application process. We help them analyze and potentially appeal awards, which will be kind of a separate training. We'll talk about how to appeal for additional dollars and then how to pay, as I said, is kind of the finish line. So that's where everything pushes down to. So any changes you make up here in your facts and your budget, schools, that's all going to push down to the how to pay. So we'll get into that when we dig in and review that. And then also you've got documents. There's a document storage in here. So you can request once we have people set up in the platform. There is a family portal as well, which will go through that. And then documents are there and then pretty robust reporting functions that we'll get to as well. And then there's also a private scholarship search. We've added that because, quite frankly, most of the private scholarship search functions out there spam you to death with credit card offers and student loan offers. So ours is really meant to just give people a safe haven to be able to find private scholarships. So so for this module, as I said, we want to focus on the facts and what's producing what the schools think we can afford. You can see there they're a little bit different right off the bat. So just kind of going through tab by tab, there are you can work through this with families if they've already completed the college money report. Some of the basic information is already going to be input. But we want we'll you will want to trust, but verify any information that they've put in kind of with any planning we do. So you will have their names. You won't have the spouse's name. So you want to get that when they come in. We try to keep the college money report very streamlined. So we only ask for the information that we need to get them to an accurate projection of what the net cost will be at the school, the scholarships and the grants. So there's understand when you sit down with someone, they often times we might just show up to the meeting. But there is also onboarding functionality in here. So the default is that they won't have any access when they're assigned to you. But you can set them into a discovery mode. We will have the email for that for the person. Discovery mode is simply inviting them to put in the rest of their data. They will have put in some things, but it allows them, you know, the cost of reporting allows for three schools. If you go through discovery, you can put in limited schools. It's also going to go more in depth into some of the financial. So so, you know, we project adjusted gross income. We'll actually ask them for adjusted gross income. So the discovery mode is there for to invite people for data collection only. And then onboarding is discovery. So it goes through data collection. But then they're also granted access to get into the family portal and play around on their own. So I don't think there's a lot hurt by putting people in the onboarding mode and letting them have access. But, you know, we'll talk through some of that and best practices as you start to have people show up on your calendar and we'll have meetings and then collaborate. Simply, they're they are now in the mode where they can go and they can log in on their own. So as you go through these, one of the things that we will coach you on is part of the sessions. Obviously, it's free advice, but also training people on how to use the technology because if they show up, they take a half hour to an hour of your time obviously have a great conversation. That's what what the the whole project is about. But also giving them ongoing access to the to the technology so that as different schools come in, as things change, let's say they have a sophomore, you know, they need to add schools, like they're going to have ongoing online access to the platform in perpetuity as long as College Bro continues to exist. So I think it's a, you know, again, pretty powerful way for us to not only get them off at the right foot, but also with the advice and, you know, what we're creating, but also to, you know, train them on the software so that they know how to utilize it going forward. And that's, you know, we'll go kind of step by step through each of the pieces of the puzzle. So, you know, that's kind of an intro to the College a pro system again, you know, having some of the community in the academy. And then if you need help up here, you can ask for help. So, you know, that's where you submit a ticket. They don't get handled by the support team ecology pro. Mostly technology questions that's not really built or intended to be for, you know, specific client case questions. That's really more of a community comes in. But help ticket if you're seeing something wonky with the software and you're going, hey, I don't think this looks right. Submit a ticket. Tell them the name of the client. They'll get back to you in pretty short order. So that's a little bit of a kind of an intro to the system. And then we'll do another video that will be more geared towards getting into each of the kind of the pieces. So stay tuned. We back with kind of going through the rest of the individual pieces.

CollegeAid Pro software technology

user interface

prospects

advisors

community feature