For years I ran my practice the way most of us do, with the usual student management programs and a purchased curriculum. It worked, more or less. But I was spending too much of my time wrangling the process itself: tracking every deadline, every requirement, every piece of student work, across every student, in tools that were never quite built for the way an IEC actually works.

I kept thinking there had to be a better way to hold all of it in one place.

So I built one, for myself.

I started with a simple idea: a spreadsheet that worked like a digital workbook, with each tab representing a piece of the college planning process. Everything a student and I needed, in one connected place, organized the way I actually thought about the work.

It grew from there. I added integrated college data so the research lived right alongside the planning. Over time, that one spreadsheet became my entire student management system, the place where my whole practice ran.

I hadn't built it to sell.

I built it because I needed it. But when I showed it to my Summer Training Institute colleagues, they were genuinely impressed, and several of them told me the same thing: you should share this with other IECs.

In 2023, I presented the system on a Growing Your Business page for consultants. Since then, hundreds of IECs have made it part of their practices, and many tell me it works better for them than anything they used before. They love that it holds the whole process, keeps everything in one place, and can be customized completely to fit how they work.

Somewhere along the way, they started affectionately calling them Cindy's Sheets. That nickname might be the thing I'm proudest of, because it means the work found a real home in this community.