Case study

Meet Howard.

Texas school finance runs on rulebooks that stretch to thousands of pages—FASRG, EDGAR, the federal Uniform Guidance. Howard is our own product, built for the people who have to follow those rules and needed a quicker way to ask how.

Product: Howard — schoolbusinessbot.com
Scope: AI assistant: design, document pipeline, accounts, operations
Stack: Python · FastAPI · retrieval-augmented LLM · self-hosted
Audience: School business professionals

The Answer Was Already There

The problem in a school business office usually isn't that nobody knows what to do. It's that the answer exists, but it's hard to find. Is this an allowable cost? What function code does this belong to? The answer is usually in a regulation nobody has time to re-read.

Sometimes it's worse. Sometimes the answer is known only by one long-serving staff member—maybe someone with twenty years in the job—and new business managers don't have that luxury. Howard answers plain-English questions by reading TEA's own documents when you ask: the Texas Financial Accountability System Resource Guide, EDGAR, 2 CFR 200, plus many TEA handbooks, guidance documents and Q&A documents, and the ASCENDER help pages. It isn't trained on them. Every answer cites the source passages it came from, because in school finance, people need to check the answer against the source.

Howard's chat interface on desktop: a welcome message listing example school-finance questions and an input bar — Users can ask Howard about FASRG topics, including function codes, fund accounting and allowable costs.

Howard on a phone, formatted like a native messaging app — Howard was designed for mobile first. Many questions come up when the user is away from a desk.

What the Chat Doesn't Show

The chat interface is the smallest part of the work. Behind it, a document pipeline converts regulatory PDFs into clean passages that can be searched and cited. Retrieval is tuned so every answer draws on the correct section of the correct document, and a test suite of real questions has to pass before any change ships. Every answer gets a second check, and flagged answers are reviewed daily.

There are also user accounts, email verification, a private-question mode, question history, an admin view, and a public feed where you can see what people are asking. The questions users ask guide what material gets added next, so use of the tool leads to improvements in it.

Howard is live, self-hosted, and already helping school business professionals answer real questions. You can try it yourself at schoolbusinessbot.com—free accounts get one question a month, and paid individual and district plans are unlimited.

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