Is Parentpay any good?

[Mr_Writer]

My local authority is trying to get us to use Parentpay but I’m resisting a bit. I’ve had a few google alerts recently and seen several schools reporting problems with parentpay’s servers crashing and payments being put in the wrong parent accounts.

 

Also, yesterday decided to call parentpay to ask about this and I couldn’t find a phone number anywhere on their website. This started alarm bells ringing as well!

 

Does anyone have any experience using Parentpay, is it any good and what’s their support like if things go wrong? Is anyone using any other payment services?

[elsiegee40]

I can't report from the school's point of view, but have used this for several years as a parent and think it's wonderful. My payments haven't gone astray and the only payment problem I had were on that day a few months back when Mastercard came under attack and it couldn't take any Mastercard payments, but then neither could anybody else.

[localzuk]

We've used ParentPay for several years and I can't remember their servers having gone down, or payments being misrouted!

 

The service just works, and we're now looking at using their texting service too.

 

However, getting someone to talk to on the phone is very difficult - they do things mostly by email instead.

 

I believe 08700 420 550 is one of their numbers.

[CyberNerd]

There servers were down last week, we had lots of complaints

[localzuk]

I've got transactions logged for every day since the 23rd, excluding the bank holiday weekend.

 

How long were they down?

[john]

ParentPay are VERY e-mail based, and they were down for 2 days last week, on the last 2 days of term Thur / Fri, which was VERY annoying. It was tempremental and annoy and created a major issue in our school. We were told it was for UPGRADES on the Thursday?! Surely if that was the case it would be best to leave them till Half Term! We've raised this as a concern to our LA (who are providing it for us) as we cannot deal with that thus we will consider our future if this continues as its not acceptable.

 

Support is good once you have hold of someone and they are helpful however they need to improve the speed of resolutions at times as they can be a bit slow when they are busy.

[CyberNerd]

I've got transactions logged for every day since the 23rd, excluding the bank holiday weekend.

 

How long were they down?

 

 

parents couldn't log in for at least a day last week. nor could our admin team.

We've also had issues with the EPOs not reducing the money out of students accounts.

[localzuk]

parents couldn't log in for at least a day last week. nor could our admin team.

We've also had issues with the EPOs not reducing the money out of students accounts.

 

The EPOS is nothing to do with ParentPay though is it?

[CyberNerd]

The EPOS is nothing to do with ParentPay though is it?

 

no. but if parentpay go down - which they did, then they don't update. when parentpay finally get their servers up it just causes mass confusion

[glennda]

We currently use Parentpay for everything as we no longer accept payments in cash/cheque it is occasionally down and there mis sync can be a pain - if you want ill pm you the md's telephone number if you want a number.

[Mr_Writer]

‘Mass confusion’, I don’t like the sound of that. People, quite rightly, get very vocal when it comes to their money – the last thing I want is parents calling us because their money has been given to the wrong child!

 

Does anyone have any experience with other systems?

[localzuk]

no. but if parentpay go down - which they did, then they don't update. when parentpay finally get their servers up it just causes mass confusion

 

That is down to the design of the EPOS system then from what I can see, not ParentPay. No system should go into panic if a peripheral server is down. The EPOS system we use here has no real link to ParentPay other than importing transactions. Balances are maintained here, not there.

 

However, if it did, I can't see why a downtime of PP's servers would cause issues in EPOS as the EPOS systems should be able to queue things up ready to pass on when the server reappears.

 

All services go down. Google email has been down, Microsoft services go down, a day of downtime is not a lot.

[Mr_Writer]

Looks like ParentPay are having more server problems, nice of them to tweet to let us know that "@placefarm One server is responding slowly causing some users to have difficulties, whilst others are ok. Apologies we hope to resolve soon"

 

Saw more similar reports from schools over the weekend - I think I've made up my mind and we won't be following our local authority advice.

 

Yes, all services do go down from time to time but when it involves people's money and results in confusion reconciling figures afterwards I think that's unacceptable.

[john]

Looks like ParentPay are having more server problems, nice of them to tweet to let us know that "@placefarm One server is responding slowly causing some users to have difficulties, whilst others are ok. Apologies we hope to resolve soon"

 

Saw more similar reports from schools over the weekend - I think I've made up my mind and we won't be following our local authority advice.

 

Yes, all services do go down from time to time but when it involves people's money and results in confusion reconciling figures afterwards I think that's unacceptable.

 

Must admit we are incredibly cross here that is 3 days of disrupted systems now, you would have thought they would have got things sorted over half term but yet they seem to have been unable to do that! We will be doing a complaint to them via our LA as its unacceptable now we have spent the 2 days before half term turning people away with payments and then today when they all brought them back, it makes a mockery of the system, and clearly shows they don't know how to have a resilient system at ParentPay if one server is enough to bring an entire system down this clearly shows they are not suitable to be running this size operation as they are, well appear not to be, a small group and thus should have multiple server for everything so at least it can cope. They need to plan better, maybe we can send them some Edugeeks to help out

[glennda]

Must admit we are incredibly cross here that is 3 days of disrupted systems now, you would have thought they would have got things sorted over half term but yet they seem to have been unable to do that! We will be doing a complaint to them via our LA as its unacceptable now we have spent the 2 days before half term turning people away with payments and then today when they all brought them back, it makes a mockery of the system, and clearly shows they don't know how to have a resilient system at ParentPay if one server is enough to bring an entire system down this clearly shows they are not suitable to be running this size operation as they are, well appear not to be, a small group and thus should have multiple server for everything so at least it can cope. They need to plan better, maybe we can send them some Edugeeks to help out

 

 

Yep Very annoyed here too - i think there problem is they got too big before they where ready and keep taking on business without the infrastructure behind it to keep there system online!

[john]

Yep Very annoyed here too - i think there problem is they got too big before they where ready and keep taking on business without the infrastructure behind it to keep there system online!

 

I suspect it is, but they should have been dealing with this before getting large LAs like ours signed up. All this is doing for us is convincing me that we should be moving to ParentMail's +Pay system instead which is actually better value for money and as we already use ParentMail were near enough ready to go.

[glennda]

I suspect it is, but they should have been dealing with this before getting large LAs like ours signed up. All this is doing for us is convincing me that we should be moving to ParentMail's +Pay system instead which is actually better value for money and as we already use ParentMail were near enough ready to go.

 

Yup i think i would transfer all depends on if parentmails system would intergrate with our cashless catering system (cunninghams)

 

but its all down to cost at the end of the day!

[PaulHughes]

Yup i think i would transfer all depends on if parentmails system would intergrate with our cashless catering system (cunninghams)

 

but its all down to cost at the end of the day!

 

Hello Glennda - you might find the following link helpful to establish which systems are compatible - https://www.parentmail.co.uk/partners.html

 

Best,

 

Paul

[glennda]

Hello Glennda - you might find the following link helpful to establish which systems are compatible - https://www.parentmail.co.uk/partners.html

 

Best,

 

Paul

Thanks Paul - i did mention to the SLT i/c of ict about it but he didn't seem that keen! considering porting 1500 parents and 200 staff across!

[Sylv3r]

sQuid | Corporate | Education is another to consider which works with Cunninghams / CRB.

[john]

Hello Glennda - you might find the following link helpful to establish which systems are compatible - https://www.parentmail.co.uk/partners.html

 

Best,

 

Paul

 

Just need to get you to partner up with Serco and use ePortal API to take data from Serco now Paul to speed things up If not for ePortal could be well worth you talking to them for Progresso

[mikegrant]

We looked into ParentPay a while ago and decided that there rates were extortionate for what we were looking at. But from a systems perspective, we went to look at a school that was using WisePay and that looked amazing, they hadn't had any problems with their system at all.

 

But in the end, were going down the road of in-house development to keep costs down and we can have full integration with all of our systems.

[PaulHughes]

We looked into ParentPay a while ago and decided that there rates were extortionate for what we were looking at. But from a systems perspective, we went to look at a school that was using WisePay and that looked amazing, they hadn't had any problems with their system at all.

 

But in the end, were going down the road of in-house development to keep costs down and we can have full integration with all of our systems.

 

Hi Mike - I'm really interested in your comment on the charges for using ParentPay (which are very similar to ours in actual fact).

 

I had an interesting meeting two weeks ago with more than 40 schools where charges for electronic payments were discussed at length. I made the point that every payment made by card (debit or credit) carries a charge and 'most' retailers will include that charge in the retail price of their goods. Some levy an additional charge of 2.5% or more for payments made by credit card whereas our rates (and ParentPay's) are considerably cheaper at around 1.5%. (We've both achieved this by persuading the banks that school payments are low risk and of course we bring huge volume to the situation - which helps us negotiate

 

Why do you think the charges are high?

 

I would also be interested in how you propose setting up your own payment facility (your own merchant account?) and how you will avoid the charges that come with every card payment?

 

It might be that I've mistaken your point and that you were making a more general point about subscription costs rather than credit card costs, but I'd be interested to know.

 

Best wishes,

 

Paul.

Edited June 12, 2011 by PaulHughes
additional point

[mb2k01]

@PaulHuges I'm assuming you work for ParentPay. What is your role there?

I'm in the position of having to decide which provider I sign our school (in fact, our brand new complete build non-BSF school) up to. Currently this had always been anticipated to be ParentPay - but after reading this thread I'm quite concerned.

For us, the kind of issues reported here would be disastrous and not just give a negative perception of your product, but actually on the school / IT in general also.

Edited June 12, 2011 by mb2k01

[Soulfish]

@PaulHuges I'm assuming you work for ParentPay. What is your role there?

I'm in the position of having to decide which provider I sign our school (in fact, our brand new complete build non-BSF school) up to. Currently this had always been anticipated to be ParentPay - but after reading this thread I'm quite concerned.

For us, the kind of issues reported here would be disastrous and not just give a negative perception of your product, but actually on the school / IT in general also.

 

I'm actually in exactly the same position (brand new complete new build non-BSF school with no managed IT provider), and we had also always anticipated going ParentPay. Reading this thread is making me reconsider however. I'm not overly keen on Parentmail (we're already signed up for an alternative messaging system), but how does everyone find the alternatives?