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Contracts & Spend

Walk into your next renewal knowing what other districts pay.

District Focus reads the agreements and POs you already have and flags each notice date months ahead. Where districts your size buy the same thing, their price sits beside yours.

Request a demo See a contract page
A contract page for Westline Office Supply: approved against spent with paid and open POs, the opt-out notice date, terms, and a renewal brief with price against peer districts.

Your contracts get one page per vendor, built from the papers already in your files. District Focus reads each agreement, PO, quote, amendment and board approval, files it against its vendor and keeps the history by fiscal year. The step that adds up the money uses no AI, so the same papers always give the same totals.

01 · Spend

See what you’ve spent apart from what you’ve signed.

Spend comes from POs and their change orders, booked in the fiscal year they print. Signed agreements and quotes keep a lane of their own, and a not-to-exceed figure stays a cap. When a trustee asks about either one, you have a number you can defend.

By fiscal year

See what’s spent and what’s signed, year by year.

Paid POs, the later years of contracts already under way and agreements signed with no PO yet each keep their own color. This year is marked, so a trustee can see what the district has already promised.

Spend by fiscal year from 2021-22 to 2029-30: spent on POs, committed in later contract years and signed agreements with no PO yet, with the present year marked.

Against the board approval

A contract heading past its board approval shows up early.

Paid and open POs sit against the amount the board approved, with the pace to June 30. When spend is on track to pass it, purchasing hears about it in time to take a new amount to the board.

Westline Office Supply contract: $184,000 used of $200,000 approved, paid and open POs, and a warning that spend reaches about $265,000 by June 30.

02 · Prices

You’ll know when you pay more than districts your size.

Where districts of similar enrollment buy the same product or service, your unit price or hourly rate sits beside their median with a verdict. It’s the number you bring to the vendor when you ask them to match.

Who sees your prices
Benchmarking tab for a student learning platform: +38% against like-sized districts, high confidence, your price of $9.80 per student against a band median of $7.10, a dot plot of peer districts and the peer table.

  • 01

    Peers match your size and product.

    A price is compared with districts of similar enrollment that buy the same product or service, by unit, seat or student.

  • 02

    Each verdict shows its evidence.

    Above, at or below market comes with the peer median, the spread and how many contracts and quotes it rests on.

Hourly rates

Hourly rates get the same check.

Special education agency rates are compared by position, from speech-language pathologist to behavior analyst, against districts your size. The savings figure stays blank for an hourly agency, because a dollar estimate needs hours and POs don’t carry them.

Benchmarking for Bright Path Therapy’s related services agreement: hourly rates above market with high confidence across 9 peer districts, and service rates for a speech-language pathologist, an SLP assistant, an occupational therapist and a behavior analyst against like-sized districts.

03 · Renewals

Renewals show up months before the notice date.

The notice period and the auto-renewal clause are read where the contract prints them, and the act-by date is the end date minus those days. An auto-renewal stops being something you learn about from the invoice.

The calendar shows a year of notice dates.

Switch the calendar from renewal dates to act-by dates and each bar shows the month you have to send notice, with the dollars and the contracts behind it.

Try asking

What renews in the next 90 days, and by when do we have to give notice?

Renewal calendar by act-by date: twelve monthly bars with totals, November selected, and the contracts to act on that month.

The list ranks what to act on, with a deadline on each line.

Renewals, seats you pay for and don’t use, prices above districts your size, bundles and items you could drop. Each line carries a savings range and an act-by date, and the list refreshes every 24 hours.

Try asking

Where do we pay more than similar districts? Rank it by dollars a year.

What to act on: four contracts ranked by savings against peer districts, each with an act-by date and a Take Action button.

Open the contract and the brief is already there.

When a contract comes due, its page carries a short brief: your price against peers, the levers you have and who owns the decision. From there you can draft the board item, start the renewal or ask three vendors for quotes.

Try asking

Ask three vendors for copy paper quotes before the April notice date.

Renewal brief for Westline Office Supply: raise the approval, then renew, with price against 41 districts, three savings levers and buttons to draft a board item, start the renewal or ask three vendors for quotes.

04 · Board questions

The spending questions trustees ask every year already have answers.

Analytics is laid out as five questions. Each answer is a sentence filled in from the numbers on the page with no AI writing it, so it changes when you change the filters.

Five questions

  1. Is spending keeping pace with enrollment?
  2. What is signed for the years ahead?
  3. Are we paying more than our peers?
  4. Where does the money go? On screen
  5. What else makes up the portfolio?
Analytics answering Where does the money go: transportation and special education take 42% of spend and five vendors take 46%, with ranked bars by category and by vendor.

With the Assistant

Hand the renewal to the Assistant and get the brief back.

The Assistant reads the same contracts, history and peer prices you see here. Ask from a contract page and it starts there, then writes the renewal brief, the fiscal impact for the board item or the letter to the vendor.

See what the Assistant does

Try asking

  1. Write the fiscal impact for the renewal on next week’s consent agenda.
  2. Draft a letter asking Northline to explain this year’s 12% increase.
  3. Compare our speech, OT and behavior agency rates with similar districts.
  4. Every Monday, send me what renews in the next 120 days.
A board item drafted on the district template: raise Westline Office Supply purchase authority to $265,000, with background, a fiscal impact table with sources and a recommendation.

More of District Focus

Bring a renewal that’s coming due.

We’ll walk through it in District Focus: the contract page, the notice date, the price against districts your size and the brief the Assistant writes. Bring your privacy questions to the same call.

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