Is your school ready to revamp your payment solutions? An efficiently run tuition management system will reduce administrative drain. Additionally, such a system can prevent your valuable resources from being left on the table. Here are our favorite tips to get paid on time and keep the tuition process running smoothly!
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- Email Payment Reminders in Advance. Even the best-intentioned of us can benefit from a friendly reminder. Help out your families – and your accounts receivable team – by creating a simple email reminder to send out in advance. Many online payment software solutions create these automated emails for your school. Be sure to include a link for students to “pay now” or schedule a payment through your website or payment portal. An advance reminder is helpful to reduce the number of late payments that your front office will need to down. Finally, advance payments help redistribute the flood of month-end payments.
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- Encourage Automated Processes. Online payments are great! However, when it comes to tuition management, automated online payment are even better! Encourage your students to schedule recurring payment. This is a great option for students who have opted for monthly payment plans. A missed payment can turn into manual input over the phone, whereas automation keeps your accounting department running smoothly and efficiently.
- Offer Convenient Payment Options. Convenience is crucial when is comes to encouraging widespread adoption of your school’s online payment solutions. Make sure to choose a versatile online tuition management system. For example, payments should be accessible on multiple devices including phones and tablets. As more and more students want to pay over smart devices, don’t let your school fall behind!
- Incentivize Early Payments. If your school’s accounts receivables team is flooded by a flurry of payments at period end, it’s time to reduce that burden. Incentivizing early payments does more than just eliminating delinquencies; it’s a great way to more evenly spread out payments over the entire payment period. The most common practice is offering a certain percentage off the bill for early tuition payments. However, feel free to offer more creative perks. Some schools offer early payment rewards such as an e-gift card to a popular retailer (think Amazon or Starbucks) or campus credit to the bookstore or snack bar.