Advisor exists because “Am I on track to graduate?” should never be a complicated question.

Long before Conclusive Systems existed, Richard Jensen was a professor trained in analytic philosophy and logic. His days were spent carefully considering arguments, rules, and structures, and his evenings were often spent discussing with students what they wanted their lives to become. That combination turned out to be the seedbed for a very specific obsession: degree audit.

As a student and later as a faculty member, Richard lived through multiple generations of degree audit practices. He knew what it felt like to be a student waiting and wondering if the classes you were taking would actually count. He also knew what it felt like to be the faculty advisor on the other side of the desk, trying to interpret cryptic printouts that did not match the catalog he knew by heart.

At Walla Walla University in the late 1990s, Richard advised humanities students with a focus on philosophy. The campus was using one of the popular electronic degree audit systems of the day. On paper, it sounded modern. In practice, it meant submitting audit requests, waiting for an overnight process to run, and then discovering that the results were incomplete or incorrect. Advising appointments turned into detective work. Richard spent more time correcting the audit than advising the student sitting in front of him.

To Richard, an inaccurate degree audit was worse than no audit at all. If you have to go back to the catalog and rebuild everything by hand, the “system” is not helping. It adds friction to a moment that should be about helping a student make good choices.

Those experiences convinced him that the problem was not only about the user interface. It was about how these systems reasoned about requirements. Over time, Richard came to believe that most tools took a brute-force approach to degree audit. They tried to jam courses into requirements by forcing people to figure out in advance all the possible ways courses could apply to every student situation, instead of understanding the relational structure of a curriculum and applying logic to it.

There had to be a better way.

By the late 1990s, Richard had developed close relationships with his students. Many were bright, analytically minded philosophy majors and minors. They had all used the existing degree audit systems. They had all seen friends surprised by last-minute changes in what “counted” toward a degree. They knew the frustrations firsthand.

One summer back in 2000, Richard and a small group of his best logic students decided to do something about it. They would write their own degree audit system and start a company to bring it to life. Their assumption was simple. If they built something genuinely accurate, user-friendly, and, most importantly, did not require people to figure out in advance how every possible scenario should play out for students, people would love it.

That summer turned out to be harder than they expected.

The founding group were philosophers and logicians first. Some had experience with programming. Others learned as they went. What they shared was not a programming language, but a way of thinking. They were used to building formal systems, spotting contradictions, and asking whether a set of rules really did what it claimed to do. They brought that mindset to degree audit.As they dug in, Richard gave clearer language to something he had sensed for years. The existing tools behaved like brute force engines. They tried to anticipate and encode countless specific scenarios. When reality did not fit those scenarios, the system struggled. The Conclusive team wanted a different approach. They wanted a rules engine that respected the logical structure of degrees, handled edge cases gracefully without human intervention, and, in short, provided an instant pattern-matching process rather than a brute-force, intervention-heavy “program interpreter.”

What began as a summer experiment gradually grew into something more serious. It took a year and a half to refine their ideas and underlying approach. But by 2002, they were ready to put a name on their work and invite the wider world in.

The company that formed around that idea was called Conclusive Systems.

Conclusive’s first public outing was not a flashy launch event. It was a simple conference booth.

At the 2002 PACRAO conference, the team set up a small table in the exhibit area. There was no professionally printed signage. Instead, they went to a local craft store, bought foam board and adhesive letters, and carefully glued the company name onto a homemade sign. It was, in every sense, a handmade presence.

On their table sat a bowl. Conference attendees were invited to drop in a business card for a drawing. The prize was not a gift basket or a gadget. The winner would receive a Conclusive degree audit implementation at no implementation cost. In return, they would become a design partner and first customer, working closely with the team to shape the product in a market-refined system.

When it was time for the drawing, the winning card came from Blue Mountain Community College. The contact was Jan Hood, who went back to BMCC and championed the idea to the administrators. Blue Mountain agreed to take the leap. They became the first institution to partner with Conclusive and to see its degree audit philosophy turned into a working system on a live campus.

That early partnership set a pattern. Rogue Community College signed shortly thereafter, and both schools found that Conclusive Systems did not just install software and walk away. The team listened carefully, addressed unforeseen requirements, and refined the user interface to reflect the institutions’ actual business processes. But the founding goal was always the same: When a student ran a degree audit, it needed to be absolutely right. And everybody at the school needed to love using the system and dealing with Conclusive Systems.

Conclusive never became a company with a huge sales and marketing engine. It did not have a big advertising budget. The product grew the old-fashioned way: Bootstrapping. One campus would adopt the system, experience what accurate degree audits felt like, and be supported by uber-responsive people at Conclusive Systems. Colleagues at other institutions would hear about it and call.

Over time, those calls came from different kinds of institutions. Smaller colleges heard about Conclusive from peers who finally trusted their audits. Larger universities came through references and personal conversations. New customers often say they had been quietly watching Conclusive for years, or that a trusted colleague had insisted they talk.

The company’s growth was steady and almost entirely powered by customer recommendations. Word slowly got around.

Underneath the relationships and the code, the mission stayed the same. Conclusive was not trying to build a company that prospered by making higher education more complicated. The team saw education as a space where technology should reduce confusion, not add to it. And Conclusive Systems realized from the start that complicated systems needed world-class customer service, even from a tiny company.

In practical terms, the Advisor degree audit system meant fewer wasted classes, fewer nasty surprises late in a student’s career, and more transparent paths to graduation. For many years, that was the quiet, steady work of Conclusive Systems. Make degree audits fast, accurate, and clear, while providing the best customer support in academia, and let the results speak for themselves.

A Quick Timeline Of Key Moments‍

• Late 1990s: Richard advises students and grows increasingly frustrated with the inaccuracy and complexity of existing degree audit systems.
• Summer 2000: Richard and a small group of logic students decide to build their own degree audit system as a summer project that extends into late 2021.
• 2002: The project matures into a company that takes the name Conclusive Systems.
• 2002: At the PACRAO conference, a homemade booth and a business card drawing lead to Blue Mountain Community College becoming Conclusive’s first customer and design partner.

Around the same time that Conclusive was finding its first customers, another movement was taking shape in higher education technology.

In 2004, a group of institutions formed the Kuali Foundation to collaborate on alternatives to the major administrative systems of the day. Rather than accept monolithic, inflexible tools, they wanted software that reflected the needs and values of higher education itself.

Over time, that work evolved into Kuali as a company, focused on cloud-based, modular solutions that work alongside existing campus systems rather than replacing everything at once. The emphasis has stayed on sustainability, flexibility, and accessibility, and on using technology to help institutions focus on their core missions of learning and research.

Kuali’s products are developed in close collaboration with colleges and universities. Feedback from those who depend on the tools helps guide the product roadmap. The goal is to deliver software that is dependable, thoughtfully designed, and a good fit for the way higher education actually operates.

When you look at Conclusive and Kuali side by side, the overlap is clear.Both grew out of higher education.Both are grounded in the belief that technology should clarify, not obscure.Both measure success in terms of student progress and institutional trust.

After decades of growth, Conclusive Systems had a significant installed base, including every sort of academic institution in the USA and Canada, and in the Summer of 2025, Conclusive Systems became part of Kuali.

Rather than ending the Conclusive story, that moment continued it. The ideas that shaped Conclusive did not disappear. The focus on accurate, trustworthy degree audit remains. The commitment to listening closely to advisors, registrars, and students remains. The difference is that Conclusive’s approach now lives inside a broader ecosystem of tools and a wider community of institutions. And both companies realized that they shared the same commitment to world-class customer service.

Within Kuali, the Conclusive mission is extended and amplified. Kuali’s broader platform enables closer integration between degree audit and surrounding processes, forms, and workflows. The same attention to logic and accuracy that began in an advising office now informs how related processes fit together across the student journey.

Most importantly, the history is honored. Conclusive Systems began with a professor of analytic philosophy and a handful of students who believed that degree audit could be better. It grew through the trust of early partners like Blue Mountain Community College, Rogue Community College, and others. And it grew through two decades of word-of-mouth recommendations from campuses that saw the difference an accurate audit could make.

That story now continues within Kuali.

To everyone who has been part of Conclusive Systems’ journey so far, thank you. Your campuses, your feedback, and your ideas helped shape a different way of thinking about degree audit. We are excited to carry that work forward inside the Kuali family.

If you would like to see more about where the story goes from here, you can read about Kuali’s history, mission, and values on our site: Read the Kuali company story.