Advise on Tucasi vs SchoolComms vs SIMS Agora Payment system

[Jehanzeb]

Afternoon all,

 

I am looking for an advise on an online payment system for our School, payments for School Dinners, Unifroms, other School products, Events and Activties, Breakfast and After School clubs etc. I've looked at Tucasi, SchoolComms and SIMS Agora but could not find any comparison chart that would compare them.

 

I'd like to know if you use any of them in your School? Do they cover everything as mentioned above and how well they integrate with SIMS.net and FMS? Any prefrence to one over others and why please?

 

Your kind help/advise will be highly appreciated.

 

Kindest regards

 

J.

[Edu-IT]

Tucasi has no integration with FMS.

[jmak]

We use Schoolcomms and it works really well for us. However, as the name suggests, its focus is communications with parents, so while it will do the other things you're asking about, it's definitely compromised. It really depends what level of functionality you need for each module.

 

For example, we looked at the clubs module last year and if the kids were following the same pattern of attendance, you could set it up and bill for the sessions. However our before and after school club has about 8 possible patterns of attendance per day and kids can have different patterns each day of the week, and then we have extra kids who use it during the holidays for any number of days and it wasn't really up to that. We also have kids attending from our partner junior school who aren't on our SIMS, so they can't be imported easily. We also sell uniform on and while you can list all of the items and take payments, it's not an online shop. Our school dinners are fixed price so that but works well and talks to SIMS Dinner Money, so the register taken in class will generate requests for payments. It also works very well for trips. For events booking, we use parents evening booking system which Schoolcomms have a link with and I couldn't recommend that more.

 

I've of the real strengths of both of those systems is the reporting and ease of use. They also both give full featured trials - you just get a standard set up which if you choose to keep, you just stay paying for at the end of the trial - no features missing and no need to start again. The support is also brilliant, so I'd suggest giving them a try.

 

You actually need to define your requirements in more detail to help you make a decision on what you need. If the needs are quite basic, you'll probably get away with one system, but if you want specialist functionality, you'll probably do better going to a range of specialist providers.

 

Hope that helps and isn't too much of a ramble....