Automating Transcript Processing with Receive Premium & Slate

Again, thank you for joining us for our webinar, hands free automating transcript processing with Parchment Receipt Premium and Slate. I am going to be your host today. I'll introduce myself in just a moment. But before I do, a handful of housekeeping items. One, your phone lines and computer sounds are muted. So, yes, you can multitask during this webinar.

So we cannot hear you. You can hear us hopefully. But that being said, we hope that if you have questions throughout our webinar today that you'll feel free to pop them in the Q and A section or in the chat section of Zoom. There's a q and a button in the, kind of toolbar force, for Zoom. And we have our marketing folks monitoring that chat, and they'll be, making sure that we get those answered for you throughout our presentation today.

Additionally, we love doing these webinars for our community. So if you have any suggestions on topics you'd like Parchment to cover, please send us an email at info@parchment. com. Please also consider signing up for our blog on parchment. com/blog, and stay up to date with any future webinars that we might have.

And, again, just a final reminder to pop any questions, comments that you have in the q and a section. And anything we don't answer will be included in, the recording and also the follow-up email that we send out. So if there's anyone from your office that wasn't able to make the webinar, you can share that with them at that time. In terms of our agenda today, we're gonna start with just a couple of slides, kind of a broad overview of the benefits of Parchment Receipt Premium and Slate. We will also introduce our panelists, and then we will have a discussion, with both Andy and Sherry.

And, if there's time, we will then open it up to you all for some q and a. I'll start with introducing myself. My name is Heather Hoskins. I am the director of enrollment services here at Parchment. Couple of fun facts about me.

One, despite the profile picture you see here, I'm not blonde, and I need a new headshot. I now have red hair, and, I'm I'm quite a bit younger in that picture. I do live in Phoenix, Arizona where, Parchment is based, and, I'm a second generation Phoenician, which is quite rare. Everyone that I know is either from California or the Midwest, much like our panelists. I love to travel.

And, last year, I actually checked off France from my travel bucket list. And as I like to say, did you really go to France if you don't tell everyone that you went to France when you got back? I don't think you do. And finally, I've been with Parchment since 2019. In fact, my four year anniversary with Parchment is coming up on the twenty eighth of this month. But prior to that, I was an admissions counselor for about eight years at the University of Phoenix.

So that's me, but really, the the story today is not about me at all. We're talking about parchment receipt premium and the integration with SLAIT. Before we dive into the conversation with our panelists, I wanna share a few high level points, as to what we see as the benefits of the integration, and then we'll go to our panelists for for their thoughts. So first, Receipt Premium makes keeping and organizing credentials simple by helping admit students faster with fast application completion. We obviously have a large customer network on the k 12 side as well as many sec.

. . Post secondary institutions that are sending transcripts through our network. And we have the ability to create a more efficient process between all of those institutions with Parchment Receipt Premium. You can also store and retain all of your credentials in one place.

With premium, your credentials are at your fingertips without having to deal with applicant folders or, god forbid, filing cabinets and paper documents. You can also save time by routing records to other admissions tools such as Slate as we'll discuss today. And finally, you can filter to get quicker access to the documents you need with automated routing and filtering as well as indexing to remove the manual burden of. . .

On the staff and decrease processing time overall. But it's not just parchment documents coming in. Parchment Receipt Premium offers a unified inbox that connects you to our extensive sending network, which obviously includes Parchment sending institutions, but also Naviance, Zap, the Speedy server, and more. And with Parchment Receipt Premium, you can connect credentials sent to you to your CRM, such as Slate, your imaging, or, shameless plug here to, Parchment's OCR solution, our data automation add on tool, or to your student information system all in an automated way. And as I mentioned, Parchment is a system agnostic.

So, while we'll be talking about SLAIT today, we can work with any technology, and integrate using that SFTP connection. Parchment Receipt Premium also makes credential records easy to access with the ability to keep all of your records in one place stored on the cloud with access to multiple users on campus. So anyone that needs access can have it. And with premium, you have the ability to store access and download the credentials at any point, and you can also customize your retention. So if any of the folks listening today have the Parchment Receive Lite platform, you know that documents tend to expire after that thirty day period.

But with Receive Premium, we can really customize that retention to match whatever your needs on campus might be. Parchment Received Premium also helps you get faster access to transcripts so you can make your admissions decisions faster. You know, we we say it all the time, but today's generation really expects near immediate results and answers. So by integrating with SLAIT, you can speed up your applicant to decision timeline, and process on a near real time basis. Parchment receipt premium can also help you save time by organizing your received credentials in an automated way.

Not only does premium unlock unlock access to the Slate SFTP, but Receipt Premium also provides the ability to receive transcripts in PEX s. . . PEX. .

. PESQ, XML, and EDI formats. Say that five times fast. I dare you. And finally, parchment receipt premium offers efficiencies and reduction of manual processing with our SLAIT integration.

We've worked really closely with the SLAIT team to create a great experience for our common members, and we currently have over 400 admissions and registrar's offices currently utilizing this integration. So with that, I am hopefully going to be doing much less of the talking, for the next, you know, forty minutes or so. I am very excited to introduce our two panelists today. We have Sherry Quinn, who is director of graduate admissions at Wayne State University Graduate School in Michigan. And then we also have Andy Marks, assistant vice president of athletics and enrollment at Calumet College in Indiana.

And Andy did receive a promotion this week, so we're gonna say congratulations to Andy on that. So with that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen so everyone can see our video, and I'm gonna start by asking Sherry to introduce herself. Good afternoon, everyone. It's really great to be here, on this parchment webinar. I am the director of graduate admissions at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

We. . . I am. .

. Just to tell you a little bit about myself, I am a big jazz fan, so you can sort of, like, find me attending lots of jazz events here in Michigan and other parts of the country, either listening to those events or, you know, with my headphones on listening to jazz music. I also enjoy landscape photography. That's one of the ways that I sort of, balance out some of the stressors in life along with doing some cycling and some other cultural events. So I've been in the higher education landscape for about twenty years.

Most of my experience has been in the graduate admissions realm at both private and public institutions. And previously, I worked in the corporate sector doing work as a specialist in systems analysis. Wonderful. Thank you, Sherry. And Andy.

Hi. I'm Andy Marks. I am the assistant vice president for athletics and enrollment here at Calumet College. This is my second webinar with Parchment, so I'm excited to answer some more questions and things. Little background on myself.

I have a bachelor's in business management and computer information systems, and an MS in management, all from Calumet College Saint Joseph. I am the, the lead in SLAIT, so I am basically the SLAIT developer. I led the team through the implementation of SLAIT, the build of SLAIT, and I currently am the one who maintains it. I am also, over the athletic department. So, Sherry talked about a little bit about, what she likes to do.

I guess I like to do athletics. Right? I'm at games year round, so, kind of athletics is is where we are. So, that's a little background on me. Thanks, Andy. And as everyone can likely tell from Andy's title, when you work at a smaller institution, you must wear many, many hats, including being a person that Parchment will call on, often to, participate in web.

. . Webinars. So we appreciate you, Andy. Absolutely.

Yeah. We're gonna start today talking about, actually, a kind of a step before, the integration with Slate and talk a little bit about the experience prior to the integration. So I was wondering, maybe we'll start with you, Sherry. If you could talk about the workflow the workflow for transcripts before you integrated, Parchment Receive and Slate. Oh, and you're you're on mute, Sherry.

Sorry. Let me just start with a little bit about, Wayne State. So we are a premier, r one doctoral research university. We generate about 95% of the research in Michigan along with the University of Michigan and Michigan State. We are called the University Research Corridor.

We do. . . Our admission model is a central admission model, so we collaborate with 11 schools and colleges to do the work of admission for domestic and international students to more than 230 certificate master's and doctoral programs. Our campus is very diverse.

We are the most diverse campus in Michigan, enrolling about 25,000 students overall, and about 5,000 of those students are graduate students. So the graduate school, we initially started with the parchment received to streamline the collection of official transcripts. We wanted to be able to reduce the amount of paper documents and provide a more efficient way of ensuring that the official documents, you know, were not lost en route to the admissions office. And, Andy, how about you? Before before you integrated with with receive. .

. With Receive and Slate, what did that look like for your office? Yeah. So ours was a very, very, very manual process. We also did not have a administrative assistant to handle any parts of it. So.

. . And I bring that that point up because it was centralized to me. So if we got an email from Parchment or we got another transcript coming in, it would come to me, and you'd have to look up the student, disperse it to the right counselor. That right counselor would have to download it, save it, and then reupload it in.

And when we figured out over time, the the time that it took to do that with the counselors or if we got a manual one in the mail and we had to scan it in and bring it into the. . . You know, to a computer and then upload it. We figured out it was, you know, six to eight minutes.

Well, you know, I think a lot of people on on this webinar can realize if you get 1,000 transcripts times eight minutes, right, like, how much time is that of your staff right there? So that manual process of download, upload, and finding which student it goes to, yeah, it was an interesting process back then. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'd like to just piggyback on what Andy was saying, the same for us. You know, we were, you know, receiving the documents through Parchment Receiver.

We were still downloading them, saving them as a PDF. We're manually applying them to the application record. I think that sixty eight minutes that he's talking about is probably, like, spot on. And like you say, when you multiply that times the number of applications, you know, that you're processing, it does add up to quite a bit of time in terms of your prop. .

. Your process efficiency. Efficiency. Yeah. Absolutely.

So that being said, great segue to our next question would be, why then did you explore a solution in the first place? I think I can probably answer that question, but we'd love to hear from you. Maybe, Andy, you wanna start? Yeah. I mean, it it was really the. . .

It's the ROI on your staff, and it's the efficiency. Right? So you're saving that time. And instead of them spending, you know, whatever it may be, eight, ten, twelve, twenty five hours a year worrying about uploading a transcript and making sure it gets to the right person and things like that, you know, they're recruiting another student. And and let's be honest, everybody on this call understands that students are are revenue, and that's the game that we're in. As much we'd like to see them graduate, I mean, you still have to have the business side of university so that ROI on that staff and what they can do with their time instead of uploading a transcript is huge.

It's the efficiency. Right? Those those files are auto indexed across the board right to the student. You don't have to worry about human error. And everybody knows in data systems, the biggest issues come from human error. And so you eliminate that down, and so you're saving even more time with your staff than having to correct problems or monitor those problems.

So for us, it was about ROI and efficiency. Yeah. So likewise, for us, you know, we actually moved to the SLAIT technician. . .

Technolition system in early January, like, right before the onset of the pandemic. And, you know, with that and the move to remote work, there was a huge redistribution of staff for us, meaning that, you know, in our office, we had quite a few student assistants that helped support, you know, some of the work that we did. And when we went to to a remote environment, you know, we pretty much lost half of that productivity. So we were looking at ways that we could, you know, save time, provide a more efficient service to our applicants. You know, we were discussing lots of different things and ways that we could we could do that.

So the the receive service was really the the answer for us. Yeah. So, you know, with technology, there's always an implementation, and, would love to hear from both of you kind of what that implementation looks like on your campuses. I know that most institutions have a slate captain. Sometimes IT is involved.

We'd love to just hear about what was your implementation process like? What resources did you need throughout that process? And, you know, maybe any configuration changes or things that you had to to make in order to to get this to work? I don't know, Cher, if you wanna start there. Sure. So for us, within our office, we have a dedicated business systems specialist, a business system analyst that pretty much, you know, was our SLAIT expert in residence. And, you know, Parchment pretty much assigned to us a project manager who came on and walked us through the entire implementation process. They provided training.

We had a few scheduled training meetings with the entire admissions team. We worked very closely with our computer and information technology department. We actually have a dedicated team that works with us on all of the technology in the admissions office. And we scheduled some one hour meetings over a two week period, kickoff with all the team members. There was a planning and training workshop.

We did some configuration checks, things around the setting of the actual protocol. And since we were already a member, like, the main focus centered around just the configuration check and the and the file setup, but it went very, very smoothly. And even though the the implementation was scheduled over a two week period, we were actually able to get it up and running at much less time than that. Andy, what was your experience? My experience was a bit different. So I wish I had the staff that Sherry has.

All of. . . All the staff that Sherry talked about is me. So I did the implementation myself.

It took less than a half a day for the implementation because I I. . . You know, as I said before, I I had built our Slate instance, so I was very versed in how to set up the SFTP transfer protocol. So I got that information from Parchment.

I set it all up, and we did a few tests. We probably did four or five test files to come over and make sure they indexed correctly and things. And it was a very, very smooth process. I, you know, I would say, you know, depending on the size of the institution, just from the experience of doing it, if you're a smaller institution, you know, you're more likely to have maybe a two or three day implementation and then some testing. Larger, you know, institutions like Sherry is probably a lot longer just by volume and things and what you're and what you're bringing through.

But it was a very, very short. It was very simple. And, you know, working with you guys was was great. And I and I don't say that just because I'm on this this webinar. I mean, it was one of the better implementations I've had across there with information provided up front that made it easy for me to walk through the process on my time, instead of having to have many different calls set up.

So Yeah. I would say, from from my own experience that SLAIT does a a fantastic job of of documenting a lot of that in their knowledge base as well, so that can be really helpful. And I wanna answer a question, that's in the track. . .

Chat because I think Sherry, Andy, and I have been, talking about this. We live this every day, and so we're using some phrases that folks may not be as familiar with. So auto index, a question about auto indexing came up. And really, that's just the process by which the transcripts that are coming in through Parchment are being attached directly to your student's record in Slate. So, when we say auto index, we're really talking about automating that process between a document coming into your Parchment inbox and then being delivered to your student's record.

So, thank you for the question. Yeah. Please. Anthony. Jump in there for a second.

You know, when when that indexing happens, you know, common language in our campus is attaches to the student's materials, so that it, you know, hits the right student and attaches their materials. And as we ask some questions later, that word attachment, becomes an interesting one that I'll I'll talk about. But, you know, attaches directly to the correct student, is how we kind of word it here. Yeah. Thanks.

Thanks, Andy. Yeah. Important to, make sure we're all speaking the same language and and understanding what we're talking about. Well, along those lines, so we. .

. The the integration is not a static thing. And so I understand that Andy, since implementing, the integration between Parchment and Slate that you've made some changes to the kind of the communication workflows with your students. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. So.

. . And and I noticed there's a there's a question in the webinar chat. I'll answer that question as I talk about it because it's about communication. So one of the things that we implemented is when we receive a transcript in from Parchment and it attaches to that student, it triggers an auto deliver message, one, that goes directly to the enrollment counselor.

And so that enrollment counselor knows the new transcript for one of their students that come in. But also attached to that email is a coach if it's an athlete so that that coach knows that they've received a transcript for their students. So they know where they're at through the process now as well. And part of the other implementation was our coordinator of eligibility and compliance for athletics. They get notified that transcript's there as well so they can go into the system and start working on eligibility early on instead of waiting for it to go through the process.

One of the questions in the webinar was about the the registrar and the and the transcript. So the part that we do is when we get one in that is noted that it's being attached to the student that's from a college instead of a high school, we notify the registrar that that transcript is there as well. So she can either go in and pull that transcript and start the evaluation process, or she's aware that it's coming so that she knows that she has x amount of transcripts to review, in the coming days depending on which counselor she's working with. So using Slate for that automated communication to the registrar and or other people on campus, allows the. .

. For their time to be efficient as well, and everybody's on the same page of what we received and what we haven't received. Yeah. And I'll add from the Parchment side, you can configure that on the Parchment, in the inbox to separate college from high school transcripts. And as I mentioned before during, some of the slides, you can provide access to anyone on campus to your Parchment inbox.

There's no limitations to the number of users. So if your registrar doesn't currently have, you know, a login to your Parchment inbox, you can always provide that. And that way, we're not having to pass documents back and forth via email or or through other needs. Well, great. There's already lots of questions filling up in the chat, so I'm excited to get to those.

But just one last question, that we had for you, Sherry and Andy, was just talking about the results of this integration. You know, what's. . . What what do you see as the value that it's providing to your staff, your students, yourselves? So, Sherry, I don't know if you wanna start.

Sure. So for for my admissions team, we have always appreciated the user friendly partner receive interface and just how easy it was for us to look up applicant information. It's just outstanding. And after upgrading to the parchment receipt premium and integrating that with Slate, we actually saw transfer, processing time reduced by as much as, like, 50%. So as we have been talking about over this conversation, the transcripts now are automatically being uploaded and attached to the applicant record.

So with that, we find that the number of email and phone inquiries asking if transcripts have been received, it's been dramatically reduced because with SLAIT, you know, each applicant has their own portal where they can go in and they can view activity as it's being posted to their account. You know, we still have some institutions that send us transcripts, you know, via the postal mail, but overall, that has been greatly reduced. And at the beginning of the session today, I talked about, you know, things getting lost in mail delivery, so that's really no longer a a grave concern of ours. Basically, yes. So so that has been very wonderful for us.

I do wanna state that with our admission process, we do require the unofficial transcript. That's what we require for admission review and recommendation, but it has been very helpful for us in the yield process to be able to have those transcripts just come right into the application once the the student receives their their formal admission letter. And, Andy, what's the results been in. . .

For you? Your team of one? Yeah. No. I mean, it's been tremendous. Right? I mean, again, the efficiency and the return return on has been tremendous for the staff. It's been great for communication.

As Sherry said, I mean, it's reduced the number of emails. It's reduced the number of pass offs, and so on. It's also it's also allowed a different workflow for counselors. Right? They know when they come in. And, again, because of the communication, they get they get, notified of that transcript.

So they're not sitting there at come in as that counselor gonna send it. You know what I mean? Their workflow has changed throughout the day to where they can concentrate on other things. When they get notified there, they process. You don't go forward with it. So it allows them better control of their schedule and what they're doing in order to be more efficient as well.

And, again, it it reduced the amount of human error. You know, when it gets auto indexed in there and attached to that student, we reduce that, you know, that error margin to about 1% now. And, basically, it's like Sherry says, the the the final couple schools that are the holdout of of the US Postal Service, right, and they still mail them. But other than that, everything just runs smooth for us. And I do wanna add, as a central admissions area working with and so this is very.

. . It's very great for us because our admission process is sort of, like, two tiered. You know, there's there's information requirements that the graduate school. .

. That applicants need to meet in the graduate school, and then there are the additional requirements that folks have to meet in in. . . With the programs.

So, you know, we are the ones that are prescreening the information before the information is made available for review and recommendation. And so with this, it does. . . You know, for those individuals that choose to send us the official transcript at the front of the.

. . Of that process, it does help us to get the information into the hands of those faculty reviewers, like, much quicker. Great. Well, thank you both.

Like I said, we have lots of questions in both the chat and the q and a section. So I'm gonna be, posing these to both of you. If you have an answer, if you if you wanna share what you all are doing, we would appreciate it. So first question here is, are you able to deliver to other SFTPs that our institutions have set up, not just the SLAIT SFTP? And I'll answer that one because I think that's relevant to, your Parchment inbox. So, obviously, we're talking about this in the context of Slate, but we can set up kind of concurrent processes where we're delivering to other places on campus as well.

So I mentioned before that with received premium, you can separate your college transcripts from your high school transcripts that are coming in. So if those need to go to separate places, you know, maybe your high school transcripts need to go to SLAIT for your undergraduate admissions process, but maybe those college transcripts need to go to your registrar, we can deliver those to a separate SFTP on campus, if that's what your desired workflow would be. So, Heather, let me comment on that. Yeah. So so at Wayne State, we have two instances of SLAIT.

So we have an undergraduate instance, and we have the graduate instance. And there have been times, like you said, there are two separate inboxes where the transcripts actually come into, and there have been times where an applicant may have sent it to the wrong place. But, you know, basically, we can just reach out to them, and, you know, we can grab what we need, you know, from their, you know, from their repository. So it's it's a real easy process to do that if that ever happens. Right.

Next question. With the Slate integration, can the index file detail whether a transcript is in progress or final? Meaning whether the transcript has an in progress enrollment or has a degree conferred date. Again, I think that's probably more specific to Parchment, so I'll take that one. So a lot of our secondary institutions, so the high schools that are sending transcripts through Parchment will indicate, whether a transcript is, final or not or mid year. That's kind of the language that you would see on that index file would be mid year or final.

Now it's it's obviously up to that high school to indicate that. So not every high school, will include that language on the index file, but it is possible. Next question. We're looking to get our transcripts. .

. Oh, I think we've already answered that one. How is the auto index implemented directly into the applicant file? Is there any other manual work to be done by staff? Andy, I think that's probably one that you can answer for us. Yeah. So the auto index is if you are someone who has used the data upload set and created a source format, the ZIP file comes in, which is in DIP format.

So it contains an index file, and it contains the actual transcript file as a PDF. And so what happens is it it. . . You set up the parameters of how you want it to search for that student.

Usually, it's by first name, last name, and date of birth, and or you can set other parameters there. So it will find that student in your system. And when it finds that student in your system, it'll update information if it needs to. If you set it that way, if you don't want it to update an applicant record, it doesn't have to. And then it attaches that file and attaches it, how you want to as a material to, you know, the high school that is coming from, depending on the seed code or if you don't choose to have it done that way.

I'm gonna kinda answer two questions in one, if you don't mind. Yeah. Let me ask what happens in there if, the student doesn't exist in the in in your instance slate, you can choose whether you have it, create a new record. So, basically, you gain a prospect, with their transcript and their school then attached to that record, so that you get that prospect. And then the other question was, you know, is there anything to do after that file is attached to the student? Depending on how you use your instance of Slate, once that transcript is in the system there, we have what's called a verified GPA and conferred, custom field and slate that we use.

And we have it that way, for certain kinda double checks where the counselor will go in and then add those GPA and the conferred date, so that we know that that student is completely buttoned up and done from there. So when we run reporting, we run it off that verified area. It also hap. . .

Helps with, come the summer, when you talk about the FIZZ app reporting and other things like that that we know that the the conferral date and everything has been buttoned up, graduation date is buttoned up. So when they run that reporting from the financial aid side, we know that it's been. . . Has a double check.

So we're kinda knocking out two or three birds with one stone, per se. Yeah. Thanks for that, Andy. Absolutely. Let's see.

Is there a way to have the transcripts documents, be added to batch acquire in Slate and not to the applicant records? The integration as it's designed is meant to send the the transcript or the letter of recommendation, whatever the document was sent through Parchment to the the person record, the applicant record in SLAIT. I'm not sure, Sherry, if you have any additional detail. I think. . .

I would think why wouldn't you want it to go directly to the student rather than than batch acquire, but maybe I'm thinking about that wrong. No. I I think it's the same thing. So Hi, Amy. Yeah.

So we we pretty much have it going to the personal record. Yeah. Okay. So next question. What is the process in SLAIT? Is it batch import or upload file? From the parchment perspective, we're delivering files to the SLAIT SFTP on an hourly basis.

So any number of records that you received in the previous hour will be delivered with that index file. So, obviously, on a slower day, that might be just one, document being sent to a student's record. But during a busy season, that might be hundreds or depending on the size of your institution, thousands of records being uploaded. And, you know, we definitely see that the benefit of having that hourly processing is you're then processing in near real time. Alright.

What is the process that staff have to do after a notification? So, I mean, as I said in the earlier answer, I mean, for us, we use the verified GPA and conferral date, areas. It is completely up to the institution. There could be anything that happens or nothing that happens depending on how you use your instance of SLAIT and what you want to happen. But it attaches the transcript right to the student. And from there, you know, it's just your policy and procedure of how you proceed, from that point on.

Someone asked what data is included in the index file. Does it vary from record to record, or is it relatively consistent? So from the parchment perspective, I'll say that we always joke it's kind of like your packing slip. It's essentially the order information from the student, who placed the request to send the transcript to your institution. So it's gonna contain details, specific to that student. So it's gonna include their email address.

Some of the information is optional, so not every student is gonna have, like, the last four of their social. That is a a possible field on the index file. But there's multiple kind of personal data elements in there that SLAIT's then using to match to that person record. And, I would say. .

. But, you know, Andy and Sherry, it would look to you. I I think it's pretty consistent across the board, of what's on the index file. I would agree. I mean, for the most part, we get pretty consistent information.

Yeah. Absolutely. Someone asked, does Parchment accept international transcripts or evaluated transcripts from a credential evaluation agency? We do have a number of partnerships. I shared on my on my slides, and when we send this out, we can share that slide again. But we do have a number of partnerships, for parchment receive.

We called a unified inbox for a reason. There are international agencies such as, CHESSAK, although now known as CSSD. We partner with TrueCopy, which is in India, and a number of other, kind of international sending agencies, that send into your parchment receive inbox. Next question, which I. .

. Andy, I think you may have sort of answered this already, which is, does Slate create a new record when a transcript is sent from an app. . . Applicant that isn't in Slate yet? Yeah.

And, Heather, I saw a couple of these that are very similar questions, so I'll try to answer them all in one. Sure. Yeah. So if you. .

. If if Parchment sends a transcript and file where there is no applicant record or prospect record, if you have your instance of slate set to create a new record, it will. If you have your Slate set so it doesn't create a new record, it won't. And part of the follow-up question was if you don't have your instance of Slate set to create a record, what happens? What happens is it sits in Slate in your upload dataset as a nonmatching unassigned row. So you can either go out there and then manually create a new record or manually assign to somebody if then later on they come into Slate after you've received the transcript.

But they sit out there in your upload dataset, inbox, and they're there until, you make a decision in Slate of what you wanna do with it. And for each of you, what what do you. . . As an institution, what have you decided to do in that instance? Do you choose to create the record or you choose not to create? We choose to create.

. . Go ahead, Sherry. Please. Yeah.

We choose to create the. . . A prospect record because we have, you know, communications, you know, through our CRM and Slate, and we can grab that. So we don't like to have it just sitting.

Yeah. We we wanna we wanna be able to make some actions on it, so so we create the prospect record. We create the prospect record as well. We run through the slate deduping process, which is in the slate knowledge base if people wanna learn how that works. And we just believe that even if there's some issue.

. . And I know there was another question about, you know, matching up names. And if it doesn't match, does it go ahead and create a new record? Yes. Does.

And then you have to dedupe. But part of the reason we do it is those students are at least then a prospect in our system getting our drip campaign, getting other information, information about who their counselor is. And so that automated communication flow is still going to them. Even if sometimes they get the same email twice, some people would be like, oh, no. Sometimes more information is better.

Getting contact information for a student to contact is better than them just sitting out there and not not getting anything from you knowing they sent their transcript. Right? Yeah. And part of one of those questions was someone mentioned, you know, I'm trying to think through if the integration would cause the record consolidation process volume to increase. So I don't know if either of you have any evidence or or data around, like, is this, you know, adding any additional time to go through that consolidation process or even what the frequency of that happening is. I would say minimal, but I'm curious what Sherry says being a local institution.

I don't I don't have an answer for that. I don't think we. . . That that really hasn't come up for for us.

Alright. Next question. So it says, I noticed additional attachments are being added to a student's record, personal statement, college report, high school report, will this become a newer process where additional documents are sent beside just transcripts? Parchment already sends, particularly with our secondary institutions, our high schools, we can already send, school reports and letters of our recommendation through, Parchment. And from my knowledge and and sharing, Andy, correct me if I'm wrong, but those are. .

. Tend to be, you know, doc types on the slate side that we can then match to in order to check off items on on the student's checklist. But please correct me if I'm wrong there. Yes. She.

. . Go ahead. Go ahead, Andy. Because No.

Mean, yes. For us, that's exactly right. Yeah. We're just collecting the transcript through. So I would I would assume that if there is a placeholder that's been developed within the checklist and slate where, any additional documents would land, that that's where they would.

. . That's what would happen. Yeah. And, obviously, very different situations, Sherry, working with graduate students requesting a different document type than than Andy is for those undergraduate students.

Okay. Next question. This one's probably for me. Can we still access Parchment for past transcripts if necessary even though they have been made. .

. Been sent to Slate already? And the answer is yes. So as I mentioned during the, slides there, if you move to receive premium, you can customize your document retention on the Parchment side. So you can essentially have a persistent backup of those documents, if anything were to happen. So there's a history that you can go redownload or, you know, if it.

. . I think Sherry mentioned, you know, if it actually needed to go to the registrar or somewhere else on campus, you can go and download it from the parchment side and send that, to where it needs to go. Next question for college transcripts, does it have the PDF attached that we can move over to our system of record? Not sure. Okay.

Sorry. Go ahead, Sherry. You wanna answer? Yeah. Yeah. So I think the question is when the PDF comes into Slate, can you then further transfer the PDF to your, like, banner system or your email? Okay.

And. . . Yes. So we just.

. . You know, we worked with our CNIT team to make sure that that that transfers over. We have an entire process where we pull information from the slate into the ERP system, system. So So as as soon soon as as possible.

Possible. Pull Alright. Next question is an. . .

Likely a relevant question for lots of folks on the call asking about the cost to upgrade to receive premium. We can certainly follow-up with any folks on the call that have an interest in that, or you can also go to our website, and there is the start the conversation page. And if you wanna fill in your details there, we will follow-up. Next question, can the imaging. .

. Sorry. We are. . .

Already answered this question, which is, can the transcript go directly to a document imaging system such as OnBase? And the answer is yes. And we can do that in a number of ways, whether it's concurrent to the sleep process or, you know, can. . . I believe there's an outbound process from sleep to your imaging system as well.

Someone asked about, will this also import the EAB enroll applications that come through Parchment? So, this is a great question. For anyone not aware, Parchment does have a partnership with EAB where we have since taken over the SendEDU process. So if you're an EAB member institution and you use their application, to have students apply to your institution, previously, you would have received those applications through EAB, but they're now going into your Parchment inbox along with any of the students' relevant transcripts or letters of recommendation. And I can confirm we did work with Slate to make an update to the configuration so that the application can come over as a document type. Let's see.

Just a few more questions here. This is a good good group of folks asking lots of really good questions. Someone asked if the student's last name is different. Will it find the student using other information? So it just. .

. Go ahead. You go. I I I mean, also, I was gonna say is I think it depends on how you have your instance of slate setup and how it dedupes, but, generally, it's first name, last name, date of birth as a default. Yes.

And you can. . . I mean, it's. .

. Right. So it's going to whatever you set up in terms of some of that matching criteria. Like, that's, you know, that's what that's what it'll hunt for. So I I guess I'll add for.

. . Because we've gotten a couple of those questions about how these records get attached. In in your in your source format and in how you have things set up, that's where you go in and set up how these records get attached and what fields and the unique merging fields. And so those who are familiar with that source format area will see that.

If not, whoever sets those up for you, you need to work with directly, to get those parameters set up, so that's the way that you want them because they are customizable. Another question here, and I think, probably not just for Sherry and Andy, but for, other folks on the call as well. Someone says, I'm curious on everyone's experiences with Slate implementation. Have you had Slate for a while, or did you recently bring it on? And which consulting company did you use for your implementation? What was your experience like? Did you already have Parchment or just recently upgrade? So I think that was probably to the community at large, of folks that are listening to the webinar. But, Sherry or Andy, if you have any thoughts on, or comments on how long you've had SLAIT, you know, or how your implementation with SLAIT specifically went.

You can feel free to feel free to share those. Sure. So we've. . .

We. . . Our SLAIT went live in January So we worked with Technolutions and a recommended consultant underscore. Plus, we are a second instance at our institution, so we already had our undergraduate instance that was brought up the year before.

So it was. . . You know, we were able to bring things up in scope and on time for the project that we had, but the slate is so. .

. I mean, there's so much opportunity within the SLAIT system that there's, you know, there's always ways that you can continue to improve the process. So, I mean, for us, you know, it was. . .

It went the way that we had expected it to go. I will say that I have a. . . I.

. . I'll add a little funny snippet to it. So, when we decided we were going to get Slate, we had just hired a new vice president that I reported to. And in order to purchase Slate, I had to get the approval of that person.

So they hadn't been on the job for day one, and I had to call him and say, hey. Can I spend x amount of thousands of dollars to buy the CRM? Because we didn't have one. And he was like, sure. But we did. And sixty days later, him and I actually went to the Launchpad.

So those of you guys been. . . Everybody's been to Launchpad, right, to implement Slate. We work through Technolutions.

Again, being a small institution, being the person who implemented, we went to, we went to Yale's campus for the for the implementation in December '18. And February 15, we launched the application. So we did it in six weeks, for about 80% of the build out, for a small institution. Since then, we've done many, many more things with it. But, the implementation was great through Technolutions.

We did not use a third party consulting firm. We just kinda did it through our. . . Through campus and what we wanted to do, but we had a large dry erase board with a huge workflow and processes and lists and things like that.

So a couple of us, myself and some IT people, went through it together as a group just to make sure we didn't forget anything, and then we did the implementation. So I think, you know, based on my experience, Sherry's experience, it just depends how big of a school you are and what you're trying to get out of it Yeah. What you need. Yeah. Absolutely.

And so that just made me think of a couple more things. So, you know, with the graduate. . . You know, for those folks who who are on.

. . Who are graduate, you are on the graduate realm, you know, the application process was a little more, you know, involved because of how the review the review is handled. So with so with us, you know, we have a, you know, the basic application, but each one of our programs has different requirements. You know? Like, you know, it just has.

. . You know, some some people will say, I wanna state a letter of letter of recommendation. I want two. I want three.

Some folks will say, you know, I I need to have a personal statement. There's lots of different things. And so the complexity. . .

That was one part of the complexity of sort of, like, building this out at the graduate level. And knowing that at the graduate level, the decisions are made by faculty, so there was the additional work in doing training. Because right now, I have, like, side that go into Slate and view and recommend applications. And so for for us, that. .

. You know, it was not something that we could do in in six weeks because it's almost like having how many ever graduate programs you have. For us, it was like having a unique application even though we had a base application. We did create a. .

. You know, there was a lot of. . . We took this opportunity when we started with SLAIT to actually review our overall process or system process mapping, And we brought in.

. . We we created a committee, and we brought in two faculty, two graduate program directors from each of the schools and colleges, you know, to help us work through this, knowing how much abuse was going was going to take place through the academic units. So because of that, you know, it did take a little bit more more time for us to kinda get up and going. Sherry, there's a question in the chat that I think is probably most appropriately answered by you.

Why would your institution have two instances of SLAIT? Initially. . . So it could be. .

. I'm just gonna. . . I'll I'll answer this kinda like in a in third party.

So you could you could just desire. . . I mean, the the. .

. Because the opera. . . The systems or the processes are.

. . They're very, very different. So you. .

. We just did not wanna have, you know, undergraduate. . . Know, we don't we don't wanna have high school transcripts.

We wanted to sort of, like, keep everything separate because we do have separate. . . Completely separate operations, you know, for both of those. Now some schools, if you're.

. . If you happen to be an institution where, maybe there's one person that's over both undergraduate and graduate that may not that may not, you know, be an issue. But for us, you know, with everything that we that we have going on, we just felt it was gonna be better to just have a totally separate instance, because the process between undergraduate and graduate is very, very different. And so that Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'll say from from my experience now, this is really common. It's really common for particularly institutions of Wayne State side. .

. Size, rather, to have two or, in some cases, multiple instances of SLAIT. Because sometimes even graduate admissions is not centralized. And so in those cases, I've seen even three, four, five, instances of SLAIT on campus because, you know, advancement also uses their own version of SLAIT. So, yeah, very common, in my experience for there to be multiple instances.

Heather, can I add to that? Yeah. Please, Andy. Real quick. Being a small school, having one instance, I wish I had two. It was literally just a cost factor for us of basically kinda doubling our price on having two instances.

I know it's not quite that because Technolusions gives you a discount on the second one. But everything they said is right about being able to keep it separate. I wish I did. I was able, you know, budgetarily to bring that in, but it becomes delicate running undergraduate, graduate degree completion all in one instance, and having that crossover of information and building out different fields and and exclusivity groups to to make rules execute. So I would say in this group, if you have a.

. . If you have the budget and you have the chance to do two instances, I would recommend 100% doing that. Yeah. There was even a comment, in the chat about someone who said that they offer both grad and undergrad degrees at their institution.

They have separate slate instances, and the fear is is that college transcripts are going to graduate when it should be going to undergraduate for the transfer students. You know, is this a common issue? And on one hand, it's. . . You know, a lot of it is relying on the student to take the actions that we're asking them to do.

So, you know, there's only so much we can do to prevent the college transcripts from going to grad or undergrad. We always recommend, you know, if you have two instances of Slate, it probably makes sense to have two separate parchment inboxes as well and just naming them as clearly as possible so students can try and send it to the right place. But, you know, as Sherry mentioned, there's still a way to kind of share files across campus if it does go to the wrong place. And, also, there's a lot of safeguards as we've discussed about auto indexing, you know, if that student's not in that undergraduate instance of SLAIT. So I can't believe it, but we're already, at our time together.

I have just a a few kind of last minute things I wanna share. But, Andy or Sherry, any final thoughts for the group? This was a great conversation. I just say, you know, if if you can upgrade to the premium, I think it's it's going to be a very wise and worthwhile choice and definitely a really good return on investment. I I would I would absolutely agree with what Sherry said. The other thing I would say is.

. . And just based on some of these questions, with slate and parchment, let your mind run wild and and dream about things that could happen, and then tell your IT department this is what you want implemented. Absolutely. And I will also say, which is a great segue, to my last slide here, is if you are going to be at the SLAIT Summit in Nashville in June, stop by the booth.

Come ask us questions, or you can go to the coding, after dark session that SLAIT puts on, and you can ask them right there to make those updates to SLAIT that you are dreaming about. So this is where we'll be in Nashville Table 3 Dash 6 on the Exhibit Hall Level. I'll be there along with a couple of our other staff members. I know that Andy will be there as well as well as a few folks from Sherry's team. So we, will look forward to seeing you in Nashville.

And just finally wanna share my contact information. If you have any questions, or you want to continue the conversation after this webinar, please reach out. But thank you again everyone for your time and Andy and Sherry for your your words and and your knowledge. We so appreciate your time today. Sure.

It's great to be here. Thanks, Heather. Enjoyed it. Alright. Thanks, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.