Orah vs. FACTS Student Information System

This is hands down the best application on the market in terms of making sure parents and staff understand where students are at any given time during the day. It also has done a great job of expanding into buy-in areas for students such as having event sign-ups inside the application. Having parent accounts also does a great job of keeping lines of communication open between the parents, school, and students.

Incentivized

We base our entire student data on the Student ID that is produced in FACTS. We create user accounts for technology and online textbooks as well as their lunch account, all based on the Student ID. We also can run many different reports using the SID as the data constant and all the other information variables are available as needed to report.

Incentivized

• Keeping all information organized in one place.
• Having my entire student database at the touch of a screen.

Incentivized

• Easy to use grade book
• Simple way to store and access health information, behavior reports, and family contact information.
• We use FACTS in the residential aspect of our organization.

Incentivized

• I would like to see all parents having to capture weekend arrangements, whether they are going out or staying in.
• An automatic reminder SMS sent to parents who have not made arrangements by a certain time.

Incentivized

• It could use more space for uploading classroom media.
• It could lessen the number of new open windows or frames for various functions that can be done on the same screen.
• It could incorporate more social-media like tools to make it more native for students and parents.

Incentivized

It's user-friendly, the customer service is great, and we have a significant amount of time invested in training our faculty and staff to use many aspects of FACTS within their areas of responsibility. I really like the variety of reports I can generate which gives important data to our administration and Board.

Incentivized

I gave this rating because Boardingware support is unbelievable. They are quick to reply and have a chat feature that they not only are there for most of the day but you can leave a note if they are not available and they get back to you very quickly. I thoroughly enjoyed any conversations I had with support from Boardingware.

Incentivized

Senior Systems did not work as well and the functionality from the administrative side is not as user-friendly. I often felt like it was down and not working properly, or that I could not find where certain documents are. I believe that for a boarding school community Boardingware was much more user-friendly, and did not take as many steps in order to get the job done quickly.

Incentivized

Switched from Blackbaud to RenWeb now FACTS. We made the change for affordability and because more software components were included. Blackbaud required the purchase of multiple additional modules.

Incentivized

• We were tracking student leave by hand or by an in-house program. Both of these became inefficient and/or unusable. Having Boardingware has expedited the process. It's hard to give numbers, but we're several days ahead of where we used to be in terms of tracking students' leave for Thanksgiving break.
• Parent involvement was always an issue, but with Boardingware parents must approve a leave before we (the school) does. This makes parents take responsibility for their child which happens less than it should.
• Having access to flagged students with health issues makes it much easier to plan field trips. We can easily know who should have what meds or epi pens based on their Boardingware profile. Safety awareness and prevention has gone up due to this feature.

Incentivized

• Has paid for itself many time over with the abilities it provides.
• Can be managed by as few or as many as needed so per employee cost is great.
• Reporting is great for almost any topic needed all the way to How many took the ACT in spring.

Incentivized