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USBE staff report vendor progress on finance API connections; $4 million support fund fully obligated
Summary
State education finance staff told a working group that vendors including Tyler Technologies and Skyward are onboarding to the USIM finance API, pilots will validate data before wider rollout, and the $4 million district support fund has been fully obligated though some awarded amounts may not be spent.
USBE Financial Operations staff updated a stakeholder working group on progress connecting major school finance vendors to the state's USIM finance API and said the $4 million fund to help districts modernize finance systems has been fully obligated.
Don (staff member) said the program has been in contact with seven vendor platforms that provide finance systems to local education agencies and that several vendors are already in active development to connect to the USIM finance API. "We've been speaking with seven different vendors," Don said, adding that Tyler Technologies "is actively connected" and that Skyward and several charter-provider platforms are onboarding developer resources.
The report included technical details about the integration approach. Don described a Swagger page that vendors can use to test API calls and said the project is hosted on Microsoft Azure; he added the team is validating a connectivity solution and troubleshooting documentation and additional U-membership connections this week. A participant who had met with Wisconsin staff noted Utah's API follows EDI principles but requires extra fields — for example, locations and program associations for expenditures — to comply with USB Finance requirements.
Sam (staff member) gave the fiscal update: approved awards currently total approximately $3,894,000, leaving about $105,000 uncommitted, but two approvals processed concurrently resulted in the $4 million being fully obligated. "We have obligated that whole four million," Sam said, and added that actual spending may be lower if some awardees do not use their full allocations; the team will monitor use and potentially reallocate unspent amounts.
Staff discussed a pilot-first rollout plan: run small pilots with vendor–district pairings to collect a year of actuals and budget data, confirm data quality and mappings, fix errors, then scale to additional districts. A working-group member noted the legal target to have necessary capabilities by July 1, 2024, and staff said larger districts such as Salt Lake City are likely to follow the initial pilot wave and may connect shortly after the July 1 target depending on pilot outcomes.
Participants named vendors and contacts: Tyler Technologies, Skyward, Tops Tech and Pelis (charter-provider platforms), and Alio/Link, and discussed outreach to district contacts (Chad Lloyd, Craig Curtis) to share spec sheets and accelerate integration work. Jared and Don were asked to assemble a timeline and materials for the next meeting.
The working group agreed to meet again in the second week of June for an update on connectivity results, errors and successes, and a timeline for the next wave of LEA rollouts. The meeting closed after roughly an hour.
