Pay It Forward is a model in the United States for financing higher education under which students attend college tuition-free, and after graduating begin to pay a fixed percentage into a fund to pay for future students’ tuition. Pay It Forward Scholarships is a non-profit organization that provides roughly $6 million annually to fund students’ educations at private schools throughout the specific state, Georgia. The organization receives contributions from individuals, families, and businesses, which then become scholarships for children in grades K through 12, 50% of whom come from low-income households.
Challenge
The state of Georgia gives Pay It Forward just 24 hours – January 1st of each year – to enter the relevant information on each of its thousands of donors into their Department of Revenue’s (DOR) online portal. The non-profit risks losing the tax break for every potential recipient they cannot get entered into the system. It is a tedious, time-consuming manual process that requires up to 30 temporary data entry workers to help with that work. That’s why the organization considered several alternatives, to make this big job easier.
Vendor
Eventually, the team arrived at Nintex RPA, software that would ultimately automate the process of pulling data from their donor spreadsheet and entering it into the state’s online forms.
Solution
Roughly two weeks before their January 1 deadline, Pay It Forward purchased and downloaded Nintex RPA. In the two weeks that followed, the group tested the software and wrote the scripts that act as a set of instructions for Nintex RPA. Just after midnight on January 1st, Pay It Forward commenced their Nintex RPA project. Working in and between the user interface of their spreadsheet and Internet Explorer, Nintex RPA moved, copied, and pasted data into the online database just like a person would.
Outcome
Unlike a person, Nintex RPA completed 120 records per minute, a rate six times faster than the 20 records per minute that their human labor could muster. Moreover, with Nintex RPA, data was entered without a single error.
