From Parentpay to Arborpay

[Era]

Hello, We are going to be moving from Parentpay to Arborpay shortly and would like some advice on how to transfer meal balances. Is there a quick way of transferring this information or do we have to refund every student individually on ParentPay? Any advice gratefully received. Thank you.

[supportman]

Hello, We are going to be moving from Parentpay to Arborpay shortly and would like some advice on how to transfer meal balances. Is there a quick way of transferring this information or do we have to refund every student individually on ParentPay? Any advice gratefully received. Thank you.

When we did ScoPay to Bromcompay it was a simple case of just changing the provider as the balances were already synced on our cashless system locally. Was surprisingly simple!

[DODICT]

If you use cashless system they will sync but if not you just have to do a bulk entry process - its a bit mind numbing but not the end of the world, there is a dedicated screen to enter this and could prob use the new tables feature to copy and paste the values into the window.

[Era]

I wonder if that would work the same for Arborpay?

[Era]

Thank you for your reply.

 

Yes, we do use cashless system, but we were told that the details will not be synced.

Could you please share the details how to do a bulk entry process?

[DODICT]

https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/203792002-Creating-Initial-Account-Balances

 

Does also suggest as I said that with an integration with cashless its expected to sync.

[DavR]

We moved from School Cash Office to Arbor in the summer, it was a manual process. I had to run off a report of all the existing balances, and manually input these into Arbor as starting balances (we don't use cashless catering).

 

Beware - you can only enter these balances into Arbor once, then the option to do so on the staff/student record disappears. You need to get these right, first time (don't do what I did, and enter a test balance on one record, that took ages to re-balance lol)

[Era]

Thank you very much! It is very useful to know.

[mark2]

What cashless system you using?

[Quark]

We're also moving over to Arbor payments, would be keen to hear how it's gone for people. ParentPay were going to charge us just for changing provider!

[DavR]

It was OK for us, overall. One of the pluses was it was pretty easy for parents to set themselves up on the Portal / App - all they needed to do was login with the email address on their parent profile. No messing about with link codes or anything like that, which we had with our previous system.

 

Carrying over balances, as above, was a bit laborious, but, that only happens once.

 

The one thing we fell foul of was the different account types. There are some e.g. Clubs where the parent selects an item, puts it in their basket, and purchases in the normal way. But, on the lower Arbor subscriptions (e.g. whatever we're on) you can't create "shop" type accounts for anything else, you have to use pre-pay accounts, where the parent pays in a balance, and then deducts from that balance when they buy things. It's not insurmountable, but you need to be clear in your mind which accounts are setup in which configuration, and make sure you relay that to parents when requesting payments.

 

We've been happy enough with the card payments side of things. There isn't an inbuilt mechanism for transferring funds between accounts (eg from Child 1 to Child 2), so if you're unsure I'd suggest always refunding the payment and asking the parent to pay again. This costs more in fees, so you can fudge things by refunding a parent as "Cash", and then paying that "Cash" back into another account (as long as you're confident you know what you're doing).