In today’s world, more and more schools are moving to electronic tuition payments. Online payments are a given to Gen Z, and this trend continues to gain momentum. Here are the top benefits that schools report after offering electronic tuition payments:
1.) Convenience
Increase cash flow with same day funding to your school’s bank account. Students can schedule upcoming payments in advance, and have the additional option of setting up automatic payment plans. In this way, schools can spread out payments throughout the year, rather than waiting for a rush of tuition checks to arrive in the mail at – or after – the due date.
Records and payment information in your tuition management system is securely stored in the cloud. Administrators can instantly access an electronic record of all payments and refunds 24/7, from any device. Students can log into their own accounts to retrieve information – without having to request it from your office.
2.) Security
ACH payments use a variety of evolving security measures for fraud protection. Use of encryption and tokenization further prevent hackers from gaining meaningful data. Encryption protects private data by turning the data into a coded message from the sender to the receiver. Without an encryption key to decode it, third parties cannot understand the data should they get their hands on it. Tokenization takes stored data such as a credit card number and assigns it a random sequence of characters. Although it references the original data, this tokenized number is meaningless to a hacker who might access it from a data breach.
Checks can not only be accidentally misplaced, but can be stolen from seemingly secure locations such as mailboxes. In fact, over a third of bank fraud is check fraud. Even when no fraud is involved, schools often deal with bounced checks due to insufficient funds.
3.) Savings
Paper checks carry the physical cost of printing and postage. More importantly, checks cost your office the valuable resource of time.
Having all payment transactions in the same software makes the reconciliation process simpler. Since paper checks can’t be integrated, all the input must be done manually and double checked for accuracy if a balance is off. There is also the aspect of paper management, where schools must file and store checks, invoices, and bank statements for safekeeping and reference. For further reading, please see “The Hidden Cost of Paper Payments.”