As a school administrator, have you ever been asked by parents why it was so hard to pay the tuition fees? After all, they either had to take the day off or get a couple of hours off of work during the day to go to the bank, collect the money, go to the school, stand in line, wait for the accountant to count the cash, fill in the forms and then get back to work, or even worse, going to the bank to make a deposit and taking a number only to find out there are 150 people who were there before you.
But you don’t have to do that anymore. Fortunately, technology has evolved so much over the last decade, especially in the financial sector to the point that almost all of our payments can get done digitally. And like many industries schools have been facing an ongoing issue regarding the collection of cash payments and deposits, something that technology nowadays can overcome just like it helped in eradicating the chalk boards and convert today’s classrooms to digitally savvy environments powered by smart boards and projectors.
Schools are already facing the below issues when it comes to cash collection:
• Wasting the school administrator’s valuable time in counting huge stacks of cash, filing paperwork and keeping count of late payments.
• There’s always the risk of theft and fraud, especially when it comes with large payments
• Some parents might be a little hesitant to pay with a credit card for security reasons.
• Poor user experience for students and parents.
Shifting from cash or bank deposits to electronic payments delivers many benefits such as:
• You’d be reducing the costs and hours spent over administration
• You get the best of both worlds, better controls over which payment need to be collected and a dashboard that facilitates all kinds of reporting
• Faster processing times with the ability to send out detailed invoices
• More efficient use of staff’s time. Improves convenience for both parents and students who can make the payment in their own free time and also reduce late payments since everyone is asked to process the payment from the comfort of their chair, most people tend to actually do it.
So how does it work?
There are 2 scenarios :
You have a website: Most school websites only provide information on the curriculum, staff or the activities plus providing a dashboard for students to manage and track their to dos, but they don’t have an option to make any payments online and that’s where Kashier comes in. Easily integrated to your website, Kashier will allow you to collect the school fees or any miscellaneous charges through the student’s account.
You don’t have a website: When the due date comes, you can simply send an email or SMS blast to all parents with the payment link and all they need to do is put in their card details and voila.
But aside from the school fees, imagine all the other fees that can as easily be collected: Lunch orders, excursions, uniforms, books, stationery, fundraising, outside school hours care, concert tickets and trips.
Not only that but the school will also see all transactions made through their dedicated dashboard, allowing them to send reminders on late payments, tremendously facilitating the accountant's job by reporting and data extraction plus conveniently asking the parent to pay either the full amount or automatically paying installments on agreed intervals through our recurring payments service.
According to a study by Deloitte moving from manual approaches to a digital end-to-end solution resulted in a significant reduction in the cost of processing payments by 60%. Having said all that, it’s time to get in contact with our team and get Kashier today.