Meet Cassie

2004

Our story starts in 2004 when I applied to Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, because it was the only Ivy League offering an undergraduate business degree. My essay? How I wanted to study finance to fix K-12 education. Even as a high school junior, I was indignant about how public schools were funded: more money, worse results; richer schools getting more; endless bureaucracy, zero transparency. It wasn’t fair — and I wanted to fix it.

2009

After four years studying finance and volunteering in schools — teaching math in West Philly charters and analyzing data for the DC Public School District — I had a choice: join Goldman Sachs or Teach for America. I picked Goldman, thinking it might one day give me the leverage to improve education at scale.

2011

Spoiler: it didn’t. My colleagues were brilliant and I learned a ton, but my heart wasn’t in it. I quit and became a math teacher at a KIPP charter school in DC. The plan: teach, then lead, then start a school. My finance degree? I figured it was behind me for good.

2013

A move to Austin changed that. I cold-emailed a woman starting a Montessori charter school for low- and middle-income families. In our first meeting, she showed me her financial model — and I spotted a $1 million error in minutes. By the end of the meeting, she’d asked me to help build the school from the ground up. My dream of starting a school came sooner than expected — and, to my surprise, my finance expertise turned out to be essential.

2015

Running finance for Montessori For All, I kept banging my head against the wall over the ERP systems we had to use — outdated, confusing, and useless for real decision-making. I begged my dad, a 30-year ERP veteran, to build one for schools. He told me no — but said I should. “Start now,” he warned. “It’ll take ten years.”

2016

The first lines of code for bookreport were written. We began with a purchasing platform showing users real-time budgets — exactly what I’d wanted back at Montessori For All, and exactly what schools everywhere needed.

2017

We partnered with Valor Public Schools, providing back-office services and building bookreport alongside them. Founders Jesse Bates and Steve Gordon, who’d previously been in the same charter founder class as Sara Cotner and me, were starting a new school four years later—and they wanted bookreport on board from day one. Eight years later, we’ve been beside them every step of the way — from one school to five campuses and more than 4,000 students.

2021-22

Startups always have their rough patches. Weeks before my second child was born, both developers quit (amicably, thankfully), and we had to rebuild from scratch. We expanded our tech team dramatically — and came out stronger and faster than ever.

2024

With all core finance and accounting modules complete, we tackled the toughest beast of all: payroll. (I may or may not have told Jesse at Valor back in 2017 that it would be ready by October 2018.) By the 2024–25 school year, hundreds of staff were using our simple desktop and mobile timesheets to track their time.

Today

As everyone rushes to bolt on AI for everything, we’re taking a different approach — using it where it makes sense (like reading receipt data) but not where it’s invasive (like touching employee HR records). The beauty of building a modern ERP is flexibility: we can move fast, implement new technology responsibly, and help schools thrive — without losing sight of what matters most.