managing monies other than Budget

[Teth]

In school we run a lot of extra curricular trips and activities which are funded in part or in whole by parental contributions. Currently this is an entirely cash and paper based system and in a school with over 1,200 pupils it is becoming unweildy.

 

We are conwsidering adding an e-commerce element to the system which would allow parents to pay for specific trips and contributions using credit and debit cards on the school website. Obviously the sums of money involved are potentially large and the security and peace of mind of parents is essential or the system will not bring the benefits and cost savings we desire.

 

Is anyone already doing something like this or considered it? any info or suggestions you have would be very useful when the idea is taken to the school board.

[MyDejaVu]

well here at school they are using a software called School Cash Office from Tucasi they use it for any trips payments and other monies, it is not an online solution (they might have something though) it is a software that you install on your network so they include a receipt printer, you can import data from your CMIS or SIMS system.

 

Regards

[Teth]

Intresting I'll look into that one.

 

We are intending online payment to be a prime goal of this to reduce the amount of wasted admin time from kids that get given envelopes of cash or cheques to bring in which then don't get handed in to the right people or get lost .etc

 

An e-commerce solution would cut out the child in alot of cases and would hopefully radically improve record keeping.

[Sylv3r]

We dont use it here but Welcome To ParentPay is something you could look at.

[Teth]

Now that seems to be what we're looking for I'll look into how it would integrate with our school website when I get the time.

[rpwillis]

If you are looking for a quick and easy addition, Google Checkout and Paypal might work for you. Once you've signed up, you can add buttons to your website which automatically take the parents to the relevant sites to pay.

 

Obviously there's a cost, but Google Checkout charges less than Paypal at 1.5% + £0.15 per transaction. This is pretty good for credit card transactions though.

 

Richard

[elsiegee40]

I'm a parent user of ParentPay at my daughter's secondary school and I think it's brilliant.

 

I pay for all trips, lunch card money, etc through it. (It's particularly handy being able to top her lunchh card up from work if she's forgotten to tell me she's running out of money)

[Tonyoung]

We use ParentPay at our school to collect money online for everything and it works really well, we still accept the odd payment by cash/cheque which we can issue receipts for and record in ParentPay so we have a complete record of all payments received, which is great. It also reconciles payments with our bank statements and the reporting gives us all the information we need to record in FMS. It’s fully web based so there’s no software involved, they use a highly secure server, and parents have their own user accounts where we publish items available to their child, they then make payment and have a historical record of what they’ve paid in their account.