In today’s world, more and more businesses are moving to online payments. Electronic 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 payments:
1.) Convenience
Increase cash flow with same day funding to your school’s bank account. Payments can be scheduled in advance, with the option of setting up automatic payment plans for your students. In this way, payments can be predictably spread out throughout the year, rather than waiting for 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. Students and administration can instantly access an electronic record of all payments and refunds.
2.) Security
ACH payments are protected by a variety of evolving security measures. 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 will 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 checks, invoices, and bank statements must be filed and stored for safekeeping and reference.