Rooted School: $50 Study Financial Dashboard

Rooted School runs The $50 Study: a cash-transfer program that gives high school students $50 a week for forty weeks, no strings attached, to test what direct income does for young people. Two hundred students across three schools.

The research is the point, which means the bookkeeping is also the point. Every dollar has to be traceable, every student's distribution reconciled against actual bank activity, and every question a funder or researcher asks has to be answerable from real data.

They were running it in CSV files.

That's not a knock on the team — it's what you use when a pilot becomes a program faster than anyone planned for. But it meant reconciliation was manual, errors were hard to catch, and demonstrating impact took days of spreadsheet work that should have gone into the program itself.

Over two months I designed and built a program-administration dashboard covering the full operational loop:

Student enrollment across schools and states, structured so the program can add a site without restructuring the data underneath it.

Automated bank-transaction upload with duplicate detection — the piece that turns reconciliation from a line-by-line read-through into a review of flagged exceptions.

Distribution vs. spending calculations per student and per cohort. This is the actual research question the study exists to answer, so it had to be right rather than approximately right.

Attrition management for students who leave mid-program, so partial participation is recorded correctly instead of quietly distorting the cohort numbers.

Funder and researcher reporting generated from live data rather than assembled by hand each time someone asks.

School and program date management, because a forty-week disbursement schedule spanning different districts' calendars is exactly the kind of thing spreadsheets get wrong.

I ran this end to end — requirements with a multi-stakeholder team of program staff and researchers, an AI-assisted build, QA, and delivery.

Program data lives in one place instead of across a folder of spreadsheets. Funder questions get answered from live data rather than a reconstruction. Students who need support are visible instead of buried in a column.

And the dashboard fed directly into the organization's first research report — which, for a study whose entire purpose is producing evidence, is the outcome that actually counts.