How do you keep track of scholarship decisions?
Keeping the reasoning behind an award findable a year later, when the family asks why this year is different.
What usually goes wrong?
The decision is made in a meeting, written on the application, and the number is typed into whatever produces the invoice. A year later somebody asks why a family got what they got, and the answer is in nobody's memory and three people's inboxes.
What should the office be able to answer?
Three things, without hunting: what was assessed, what was awarded, and what the family was actually asked to pay.
Those are different numbers and they drift apart easily. The tuition is what the yeshiva charges. The award reduces it. What the family pays is what remains — and if a sponsor covers part of the rest, what the family pays is different again.
How do you stop them drifting?
The assessment is calculated, never typed twice. Tuition less scholarship, taken from the applicant record, everywhere it appears — on the family's portal, on the contract, on the collections list.
If somebody changes the award, every one of those follows. Nobody has to remember to update the second place, because there is no second place.
What does the family see?
Their own figures, and only their own. Full tuition, the award, what is left, and the schedule they agreed to. If a sponsor is covering part of it, and the office has allowed it, they see that too — which is often the kindest thing you can show a family that is worried about the total.