News & Events

From Albany Business Review / By  Sam Raudins –  Reporter / December 6, 2022

As students began to adjust to school in a post-pandemic environment, clients of Transfinder said the number of disciplinary incidents on school buses increased.

As a result, more reports were being filed, and Transfinder — the Schenectady-based software company whose product helps school districts determine the best school bus routes while tracking fuel consumption, maintenance costs and vehicle replacement — realized part of its software could be expanded for use outside of transportation.

Formfinder is part of Transfinder's existing software. But now, as the tool has been used more often, CEO Antonio Civitella said the company has realized the tool can be used in new ways to provide added value to customers.

Transfinder has 2,200 clients in North America. The company's clients have created 155 different types of forms using Formfinder in a variety of areas, including behavior/discipline, training, performance evaluations and leave requests.

Civitella describes as a Formfinder as versatile "Lego piece" of their system that can create forms and analyze responses. All forms and results live in one place for administrator use.

The data collected from the forms can be displayed in different ways depending on the customer's preference, including dashboards, email reports and more. At first, Formfinder was used for documenting student incident reports on buses and was part of the parent app, Stopfinder.

Though Transfinder isn't necessarily the only company offering such a service, Civitella said the advantage is that many customers are already paying for the service.

"Our industry wants to have one partner, really one solution," he said. "There's a lot of systems out there, they're all very good. You need one company to just be the point person, the one that if there's an issue, there's only one person that you can call."

Possible uses for school districts outside of transportation include field trip forms, student registration, parent surveys with geographic limits as to where surveys can be completed, as well as surveys for the local community. Civitella said the company is open to expanding the service to other businesses.

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