The Composite Financial Index (CFI) is a sophisticated tool designed to help you think strategically about your school's overall financial health and communicate succinctly about it with school leaders. Employed by higher education institutions for decades, the CFI produces a complete picture of your institution's financial strengths and weaknesses in a single score that is based on four underlying core ratios. To develop the CFI, experts with the Big 4 accounting firm KPMG ran longitudinal models on data from over 250 colleges. From this, the team developed a scoring scale, metric scale and weighting scale. NBOA offers the CFI tool as an Excel workbook, or, NBOA members with sufficient data in NBOA’s data reporting and analysis tool, BIIS, may view their CFI scores in the CFI Calculator report in BIIS. NBOA's work with the CFI is the result of an important partnership with the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), in conjunction with CFI co-creators, Phil Tahey and Ron Saluzzo.
In this course you will learn from a variety of curated resources including videos, articles, recorded webinars, case studies and discussion boards. Through this work you will learn:
This course is offered in partnership with the Association for Academic Leaders.
In the first week of the course, you will learn about the genesis and benefits of the Composite Financial Index. You will be introduced to the four core ratios and how they are calculated and used in discussion of the index. Also in this week you will calculate a five-year trend of the core ratios, or review the calculation provided for you in BIIS, and develop a narrative of the trends and factors/actions the school has taken that are affecting the trends.
In the second week of the course you will learn how to understand and effectively communicate the information the CFI calculations present. Learn how other adopters of the CFI use the tool to enhance their own understanding of their school’s financial health and also how they communicate that information to their boards and administrative teams in order to enhance the financial position of their school.
NBOA is recognized by SHRM to offer SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP professional development credits (PDCs). For more information about certification or recertification, please visit www.shrmcertification.org.
NBOA is a recognized provider of recertification credits. HR Certification Institute® pre-approved this program for credits towards aPHR™, PHR®, PHRca®, SPHR®, GPHR®, PHRi™ and SPHRi™ recertification.
Up to 35 participants
Program Sponsor
This course was extremely helpful in quantifying the financial health of my school. It provided tools to not only analyze the impact that past decisions and actions had on our Composite Financial Index, but to see what impact future decisions and actions might have on our financial health. Well worth the time and money!
Marietta Wahl
Chief Financial Officer, Oak Grove Lutheran School
