Town School for Boys exists to broaden what boyhood can mean. On an urban campus in San Francisco — where two of the school's athletic fields sit on the roof, and a rooftop garden grows above them — boys can be artists, mathematicians, leaders, and caretakers in equal measure. 

Town's families arrive from more than 35 zip codes across the Bay Area, with split households, dual incomes, and complex financial pictures. For years, the systems couldn’t keep pace with the families.

Trust on the Front End and the Back End

For Kary Norton, Chief Financial Officer at Town School for Boys, the case for Clarity started with how the platform looked and felt. 

"The thing I underline the most is the sleekness of the user interface – and I'm not using that word superficially.”

“Clarity enables people to work swiftly without losing all the back-end functionality that we need."

For a CFO, the easier test is whether the platform looks usable. The harder test is whether the numbers underneath are right.

"I'm an accountant, so knowing the calculations can be trusted and are thoughtfully planned out is important. Having a sleek product that doesn't do what it needs to do is not helpful."

A Platform That Understands How a School Actually Works

With divorced households, split-cost contracts, and financial aid adjustments that change what each parent owes, Town School has the kind of operational complexity that doesn't fit a simple template. 

"Clarity understands what a school experiences. You accommodate split households with parents who want to sign the same contract and split the cost, and you're adjusting deposits based on financial assistance. That's something I would have had to manually adjust before. Now it's automated."

“There are so many things I no longer have to remember to manage, and the mental load of tracking all those things has been greatly diminished."

Getting Every Contract to the Finish Line

The headline of Town School's first contract cycle with Clarity is a number that had eluded the school for years.

"We require both parents to sign the contract when there are two parents, and there has not been a single year before this one where we could get every parent to sign. We would have at least 20 or 30 contracts where only one parent signed, and we'd have to move on because we'd already emailed so many times,” Norton explained.

“This year, within the month, we got every single one of our 420 contracts to have two parent signatures. That's a huge feat."

For Richard Won, Town School’s Controller, the visibility into contract status was what made closing the gap possible.

"Being new at the school, what really worked was tracking who had signed, who hadn't, and who had partially signed. Seeing it in a single dashboard made it really easy to follow up with families."

A Rare Partnership

"Working with vendors and software has become increasingly hard. The teams are harder to work with, or the products aren’t a great fit,” shared Norton. 

“Clarity has a great team behind it with the ability to swiftly implement change. You don’t see that from school vendors who have really established themselves over the last 20 years.”