How to Save Time on NCAA and EADA Reporting

As any university athletics office knows, the annual NCAA and EADA reporting processes are highly time consuming. With data scattered across accounting systems, ERPs, databases and spreadsheets, staff members spend countless hours consolidating information, validating entries and formatting reports to meet complex reporting requirements—often on tight deadlines. This operational burden bogs down your team and increases the risk of errors.

Streamlining and automating these reporting processes can save significant time and resources while also improving data accuracy and compliance.

In this article, we'll explore six strategies to optimize your NCAA and EADA reporting workflows.

Strategy 1: Centralize Data Sources

One of the most inefficient steps in NCAA and EADA reporting is the data-gathering process. This tedious undertaking often involves manually exporting information from various sources and painstakingly combining and translating the data into the required reporting formats.

Streamline this process by centralizing all your data in a single repository. This enables you to store all relevant information in a consistent, reportable and easily accessible format, eliminating the need for duplicate data entry across systems. With a central database acting as a single source of truth, misunderstandings due to inconsistent data will be reduced (if not eliminated entirely.)

ARENA by James Moore Digital streamlines data centralization by integrating data from a variety of sources into one central platform. With it, you can automatically consolidate and centralize data from many different systems — making all your data easier than ever to find.

Strategy 2: Streamline Data Collection and Validation

Consolidating data is only the beginning of the process. Once you have all of your data in one spot, you still need to translate, categorize and validate everything. This often involves manually cross-referencing individual data points against reporting guidelines, checking calculations and meticulously searching for anomalies across thousands of line items.

Now, there are a few different ways you could streamline this process. First, you could standardize accounting, categorization and data entry policies across the university. This, combined with data checks and validation on a regular cadence, would make it easier to integrate data from multiple sources. However, building university-wide processes and changing existing university-wide account codes and tags to meet EADA and NCAA financial reporting category requirements is far from an easy task.

This is where technology comes in. Data integration and validation tools like ARENA can automatically collect the information, translate and map it to the appropriate categories, perform calculations and validate entries against built-in rules to catch errors — saving hundreds of hours of work.

Strategy 3: Leverage Proven Automation Solutions

While automation is a clear solution, building these tools from scratch is unnecessary. It’s possible, and the tools might be effective. But there’s no question that this extremely costly and time-consuming endeavor pulls resources away from your athletics department's core mission.

Instead, adopt pre-built automation solutions designed specifically for the unique reporting requirements of collegiate athletics programs.

Solutions like ARENA from James Moore come pre-configured with proven capabilities to streamline the entire reporting lifecycle. And because it is purpose-built for university athletics reporting, it accelerates deployment timelines versus developing a custom solution from the ground up.

Strategy 4: Stay Ahead of Updated Reporting Rules

Reporting requirements and data sources tend to evolve as guidelines change or new systems are implemented. As a result, teams need to update their reporting processes to ensure they accommodate all recent changes, adding time to the manual reporting process.

Automated reporting solutions prove their worth by continuously refining validation rules and data mappings to account for these shifts. This reduces the amount of time teams need to spend fixing their reports.

Each year after completing your reports, be sure to review any errors or anomalies that were caught during the process. Then work with your automation provider to update the rules and mappings to catch those issues automatically next year. This progressive optimization allows your system to get smarter and more comprehensive over time.

Strategy 5: Conduct Thorough Process Reviews

Regularly reviewing your reporting processes is critical to improving efficiency. A comprehensive process review can reveal opportunities to streamline, reallocate responsibilities, enhance controls and implement best practices.

This is especially important before automating, because it allows you to make sure the most efficient and accurate processes are captured by the automation.

If you’re not sure where to start, don’t worry. You don’t have to do it alone. James Moore Digital can guide your athletics department through this crucial review phase, leveraging our years of experience optimizing reporting processes to provide an objective third-party perspective on areas to improve.

Strategy 6. Perform Regular Assessments and Data Analysis

Beyond your annual NCAA and EADA reporting obligations, the data you collect each year provides immense value in terms of informing strategy and growing your program.

With all reporting data consolidated in a consistent, structured format, you can easily search, filter, and analyze information across your entire data set. This makes it easier to perform regular audits and analyze data pertaining to areas like budget management, compliance, recruiting and more. As a result, your reporting data can continue to be an asset throughout the year.

But what does this have to do with your reporting process? Simple — by interacting with your data regularly, you can more easily ensure that everything is complete and up to date. This will help eliminate inconsistencies and reduce the workload when reporting season rolls around.

And automation makes this all even easier.

ARENA was designed to help university athletics programs unlock strategic value from their operational information, whether they’re running an NCAA report or simply doing research. By making data analytics easy to access, you can sharpen your decision-making and uncover opportunities to optimize and grow your athletics program.

Achieve Quicker and Easier NCAA Reporting with James Moore Digital

When you optimize NCAA and EADA reporting processes, you do more than just save time and resources. You can also reallocate those resources toward higher-impact activities that might otherwise have fallen by the wayside. While basic automation tools provide some relief, purpose-built solutions like ARENA by James Moore Digital take efficiency and insight to the next level.

If you want to save time, reduce risk, and unlock deeper value from your data, schedule a consultation today.

All content provided in this article is for informational purposes only. Matters discussed in this article are subject to change. For up-to-date information on this subject please contact a James Moore professional. James Moore will not be held responsible for any claim, loss, damage or inconvenience caused as a result of any information within these pages or any information accessed through this site.