In August, our Student Billing was upgraded are we are preparing to merge student and individual records between SB and EE. For those who have recently gone through this process, did you tackle this job in house? We are considering using Staffing Solutions to do the work because we don't have a Database Manager and nobody has the time to work on this with our other responsibilities. Has anyone used Staffing Solutions to complete this process, and if so, how did it go?

I read the RO/SB Integration post and wanted to ask a few more questions. If you merged these records yourself, how long did this process take? When was the work completed? We'd like to wait until the summer, but we understand that the longer we use the database with two collections of records, the more of chance we have for inaccurate data. I'm just concerned that there are more people in the database now verse July. If we are doing are daily work while some records are merged and others are not, this makes me nervous.

If we do the work ourselves, would you recommend merging the students first and then the parents? Or, vice versa? Maybe it doesn't even matter. We are hoping to let the EE record be the primary one because the SB office puts in a minimal amount of data. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Tara, we integrated EE and SB this summer and because we did not do the necessary database cleanup before hand it has been an absolute mess.  We had thousands of duplicate records and are still cleaning things up.  It is very time consuming and I understand your wanting to hire an outside company to do the job.  We are doing it in house and it is very tedious.

Even if you outsource the database cleanup I highly recommend that you establish database entry standards for new data and limit who can enter new data.  Otherwise you will be taking one step forward, two steps back!