NCAA Reporting Automation: What To Expect

High-quality reporting is essential for the integrity and success of collegiate athletics programs. Compliance with NCAA and EADA reporting standards ensures transparency, accountability and fair play and can also greatly impact a program’s recruiting and revenue. As athletic departments face increasing demands, manual reporting methods that are inefficient and prone to errors may create challenges for athletics programs nationwide.

Automating these reporting processes can transform athletics departments’ financial operations and provide significant benefits in terms of efficiency, accuracy and strategic resource management.

What is NCAA Reporting Automation?

NCAA reporting automation refers to the use of software to streamline the data collection, processing and reporting tasks required for NCAA and EADA compliance.

These processes are typically manual, time consuming and prone to human error. Much of the data required for these reports is sourced from other offices across the university. These offices use their own accounting methods that may not align perfectly with the athletics department’s preferences or NCAA reporting requirements.

Automation changes the game by significantly reducing the workload of collecting and synthesizing this data. That not only improves data accuracy, it also frees up staff to focus on more strategic activities.

Additional benefits of automation include:

• Time savings: Automation drastically reduces the hours spent on data entry and report generation.
• Cost efficiency: By minimizing manual labor, institutions can reallocate resources to other critical areas.
• Improved accuracy: Well-designed automated systems reduce the risk of human error, ensuring more reliable data.
• Consistency and compliance: Effective automation ensures reports are consistently formatted and meet all compliance requirements.

Building a Business Case for NCAA Reporting Automation

Creating a compelling business case for NCAA reporting automation can be challenging if you’re unfamiliar with the potential ROI of automation technologies. Understanding the potential benefits compared to the current state of your reporting processes can make the case clear.

When building your business case, consider:

• Quantifying time and cost savings: By analyzing current manual processes, institutions can estimate the time and labor costs automation would save.
• Improving reporting consistency and data accuracy: Automation enhances data integrity by reducing manual entry errors. This consistency is critical for maintaining compliance and making informed decisions.
• Demonstrating ROI: Improved efficiency and accuracy translate into tangible financial benefits. Fewer errors and quicker reporting cycles can lead to better resource management and strategic planning.

If you’re not sure how to get started, don’t worry. When you work with an automation provider like James Moore Digital, your advisor can work with you to build a comprehensive business case. This minimizes up-front investment and helps institutions accurately forecast the automation’s ROI.

NCAA Automation Process

Implementing NCAA reporting automation is a fast-moving but multi-step process, ranging from initial planning to full deployment. Understanding these steps and potential challenges can help ensure a smooth transition for your team. We’ve detailed the typical process of implementing James Moore’s NCAA and EADA reporting tool, ARENA by James Moore Digital.

Automation Timeline

The timeline for implementing NCAA reporting automation can vary but can typically be accomplished in four to six weeks. This quick turnaround is possible because you’re using existing software – instead of starting from scratch. Rather than building new processes from the ground up, athletics departments that use ARENA by James Moore Digital benefit from proven automation technologies that can be carefully tailored to your institution’s reporting needs.

With that said, some obstacles could slow this process down, including:

• Pre-existing problems or inefficiencies in reporting processes
• Limited or no access to important data sources
• Lack of resources or participation from internal teams like IT and the athletics program’s business office

To streamline your automation process, prepare in advance to avoid these challenges and ensure the automation team has the necessary resources.

Staff Resources Needed for Automation

Effective automation requires collaboration between the IT team and the athletics program’s business office. Here’s how each team contributes:

• University IT team: Responsible for providing source data files and setting up internal procedures to provide that data (e.g., automated jobs).
• Athletics business office: Provides critical input on reporting requirements, mapping and data validation criteria. The resource commitment is relatively minimal compared to the extensive manual processes automation replaces. This shift allows staff to focus on higher-level analysis and strategic decision-making.

When you work with the James Moore team, you can expect our professionals to be extremely hands-on throughout the process of planning, building, and implementing your new automation solution. Our team does all the heavy lifting, making the transition from manual reporting to an automated tool like ARENA by James Moore Digital as seamless as possible.

Here’s what Drew Edison, Senior Associate Athletic Director – Finance and Administration/CFO at the University of Illinois-Chicago has to say about his team’s experience with ARENA by James Moore Digital:

“We had staff turnover and a tight timeline to prepare everything for the EADA and NCAA reporting deadlines. Due to staffing changes and poor internal reporting, we were concerned that we would not be able to report accurate data. We were able to implement the James Moore NCAA and EADA reporting tool in less than six weeks (including the time it took to coordinate with IT and other departments) and produce the outputs we needed in mere minutes.

Initial Implementation

To start the automation process, our team works to gather the data the solution needs. This involves working with the university’s IT department to access the data stored across all university systems.

Next, the automation team works with the university’s key stakeholders to develop the mapping rules that will be used to identify and categorize the data for the reports. In other words, the team sets the parameters that ARENA by James Moore Digital will use to pull data into the final reports.

This process includes:

• Creating the logic to format raw data for the NCAA and EADA reporting requirements.
• Setting up validation checks and anomaly detection to ensure all data is complete and accurate.
• Customizing the system for the university’s unique data sources, accounting methods and reporting needs.

Once this process has been completed, you’ll theoretically have a functioning automation. However, the process isn’t complete yet. ARENA by James Moore Digital won’t officially launch until after the team has tested it to ensure it functions correctly.

Testing Your Automation

In the final implementation stage, the James Moore Digital team and the university’s internal stakeholders work closely together to thoroughly test the implementation before finalizing it.

During this rigorous testing process, the team uses the previous year’s reporting data and runs the automation through various scenarios to identify any potential issues or errors.

By comparing the automated reports against the manually prepared reports from the prior year, the team can verify that all necessary data fields are being accurately captured, numerical values fall within expected ranges, and the final report outputs are correctly formatted to meet compliance requirements.

If any discrepancies or problems are uncovered during this testing phase, the team works to fix them by refining the data mapping rules, validation checks, anomaly detection parameters and other system components as needed.

This iterative process of testing, identifying issues and optimizing continues until the automation system consistently produces accurate, complete and fully compliant NCAA and EADA reports that match the expected results from the previous year.

Once this process is complete and the automated reports align perfectly with the prior year’s manual reports, the automation solution is validated and ready for launch.

Launching Your Automation

Launching the initial automation involves a managed transition from manual to automated reporting processes. Here’s what to expect during this rollout phase:

• Initial deployment: Ensuring the system functions correctly from the outset by producing accurate reports. This phase may involve additional monitoring and incremental adjustments as the automation is fine tuned based on actual operational data.
• User training: Providing comprehensive training for staff to familiarize them with the new automated system, workflows and processes. This enables smooth user adoption.
• Increased efficiency: As the system becomes more established and requires less hands-on oversight, the reporting process becomes even more streamlined and optimized. Staff can now reallocate their efforts toward higher-value strategic initiatives rather than labor-intensive manual reporting tasks.

Ultimately, this is not a static, one-time implementation. Rather, it continues to evolve and adapt to changes in reporting requirements over time. For example, if new reporting rules or data elements are introduced, they will be seamlessly incorporated into the existing automation workflows.

As a result, the team no longer needs to make laborious manual adjustments. Furthermore, each year the automation expands with additional reports, validations and analysis capabilities layered into the system. This provides athletics programs with insights and value from their data than they were previously getting.

By transitioning to ARENA by James Moore Digital, universities can meet their compliance requirements faster, more accurately and with greater efficiency – freeing up valuable resources that can be repurposed toward other institutional priorities.

Simplify Your NCAA Reporting with ARENA by James Moore Digital

When your athletics office is bogged down in tedious manual data reconciliation, NCAA and EADA reporting can feel like a chore, rather than an opportunity. By automating this process, you can not only save hundreds of hours of work (and therefore time and resources that can be better used elsewhere) but also transform your perspective. Instead of a chore, this data can become a strategic asset to help your athletics program grow.

James Moore’s Collegiate Athletics team can help you transform your reporting, freeing you from the slog of manual data collection and transformation, so you can focus on strategic priorities. As a result, your reporting process will be faster and more transparent.

To learn more about how ARENA by James Moore Digital can transform your reporting process, contact James Moore 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.