mikegrant

If you already have a merchant account e.g. take card payments on site? There's the option of going it alone. This is what the college I work at did, we created our own system from scratch. All be it probably very over the top for what you need, as this provides a POS terminal for several locations around the college site and has custom integration to any and every service that we need. Haggled over our fees with the merchant and got ourselves a substantially cheaper deal than going with ParentPay etc. If you feel that the cost of going with these companies is too much then it's worth looking at the huge initial outset for the cost savings further down the line. However, in the proccess of setting our own up we went to look at a school that was using WisePay, and their feedback was that it was fantastic. Parents/staff loved using it and couldn't speak ill of it.

We use wordpress running on IIS/SQLSrv, runs like a dream. It's flexible if you know what you're doing with it. But it's definitely a good starting point!

Seems that the months and months of development have paid off for me. As I've said before in this thread, we were very unimpressed and it might be worth some of you who are majorly cheesed off and need to move away, try calling WisePay and see if they can help you move away....

Whilst looking at what system we were going to use here, we went out to a college that was using wisepay and they couldn't speak highly enough of them. They said that the level of service was excellent and that all the integration was done for them and free of charge. It's definitely worth talking to them about it and trying to find a school that uses it and then go talk to them!

How have you found them so far? What process did you go through in terms of setting up with them?

The charges are just higher than what we were being quoted by sorting things out by ourselves. We still pay for every card payment, but extended our merchant account with our bank and reduced rates for our card terminal as well as what we paid for taking transactions online. That combined with being able to create software that more suited our needs and allowed for easier integration into our sims/Active Directory/smartcard system. Combined with a need for an internal POS system. Just meant the development cost (my time) was worth it when combined with the rates that we were quoted.

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.