If you buy it, you better use it. That especially holds true for K-12 school officials who altogether spend more than $8.3 billion on education software each year, according to estimates from the Software and Information Industry Association. Yet it can be tedious to manually keep track of how students interact with different pieces of software—or whether these tools are even being used. For many districts, it takes time and a bit of Excel wizardry to download data from each software provider, then combine and distill the information into a single dashboard. “We had to go into different websites, find different usage reports, talk to vendors,” says Matthew Raimondi, an assessment and accountability coordinator at U-46, a school district in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago. “You run around to a bunch of different places to get information about whether students are actually making progress through the tools.” The days of hacking together spreadsheets may be coming to an end, however. Since last fall, Raimondi, along with technologists at 19 other school districts, have piloted a new service that automatically provides data in how students engage with different online education programs. Dubbed “Clever Goals,” the tool lets educators, students and parents see how long a pupil spent on different digital learning programs, along with their “progress,” which is defined differently depending on the kind of edtech software. (It could be books read, quizzes finished, activities completed.) Teachers can also set weekly usage targets for individual students and track their progress against those goals.