In a survey by the District Administration at the start of the 2023-2024 school year, 45% of schools surveyed reported insufficient staff as an ongoing issue. As districts grapple with the downstream effects of limited resources, it becomes even more important for schools to find technology partners that can create efficiencies and help them overcome operational challenges.
By centralizing school payments and registration onto one platform, like MySchoolBucks, schools can save time while simplifying routine, often manual tasks, such as collecting physical payments, processing paperwork, and more. Finding the right solution to help mitigate these cumbersome processes ultimately allows staff to focus more on what matters most - the students.
Here are 4 major ways we help our school partners do more with less:
Less manual work
Whether you’re sifting through registration paperwork, tracking cash/check payments or making phone calls home to remind a parent that an invoice is due, your days may often be filled with lots of manual tasks. When looking at all the school programs across your district, these tasks quickly add up to many hours or even days of work.
Payment platforms, like MySchoolBucks, help streamline the entire fee collection and registration process and greatly reduce time spend on these manual efforts. For instance, instead of individually billing students for a class fee, a payment platform can automatically assign invoices to a particular group of students (e.g. high school grads, 6th grade field trip) and easily notify parents that a fee is due. You can even set up invoices for recurring fees and issue them digitally with just a few clicks.
With online registration for school programs, there’s no need to collect physical paperwork for students who need to register for a before & aftercare program, class, sport, or school event. Now registrations are captured digitally, eliminating any manual data entry for parents or staff. Parents can upload required documents (e.g. waiver), fill out registration details, and even provide a digital signature.
After registration and payment is collected, your payment platform gives you one centralized location to track payments and outstanding invoices all in one system, simplifying your management process.
Faster payment collection
With an online payment platform, you can utilize invoicing to simplify and speed up payment collection. We've found that if utilizing this tool, over 80% of invoices are paid within 30 days making it a faster process resulting in quick deposits into the correct school bank account.
Parents can often forget about student fees amidst their busy lives, and need a quick and easy way to make sure their students accounts are up to date. With MySchoolBucks they can simply log in to the online app and see any outstanding balances on their student's account. To ensure timely payments you can also send invoice reminder emails and in-app notifications to remind parents of an outstanding invoice, allowing you to collect payments faster and spend less time tracking down unpaid fees.
Different school programs may require different methods for collecting payment digitally. You’ll have options for collecting fees based on what works best for you – whether it's through an online store, invoices, or in-person payments. As an added bonus, districts will also reduce the amount of cash and check handling. Reducing the number of cash payments means staff can spend less time collecting, handling and managing physical payments.
Easier reconciliation
In any given school year, districts have to collect thousands of student fees. When these fees are collected manually or through multiple platforms, tracking and reconciling becomes a major pain point for district staff. By using one unified payment platform across your entire district, your finance and accounting teams can gain better financial oversight, easier reporting, and stronger security.
Reporting tools allow you to easily track payments and create reports on specific fees that can be shared with others. You can filter your reports based on the school, class grade, budget code, and more. School bookkeepers will love having just one central place to reference when reporting on funds and reconciling fees in their accounting process. Using MySchoolBucks, you can even export reports into specific formats to streamline importing deposit and transaction information into your accounting system.
Better communication
Keeping parents informed takes a lot of resources, both from a staffing and budget perspective. With MySchoolBucks, schools can share important school announcements, fees, documents, and more on your Parent Portal. Through the app, schools can also easily upload important documents and forms that parents can access from the quick links tab. It’s easy for schools to use and convenient for parents to find all their student’s information in one place.
Improving communication also means being able to send reminders when payments are due. With students who participate in many activities, missing a payment due date can be all too common. Help parents stay organized by sending invoice reminders directly to their emails and through the app, decreasing the chance of missed payments. They can also set up low-balance reminders to help ensure their student's meal account doesn't go into the negative.
As the school year progresses, districts will continue to face various challenges. With the support of a team like MySchoolBucks, we can help you create efficiencies that allow for more time to focus on other important tasks, enabling you to cross off items on your to-do list. If you're looking to streamline your administrative tasks and provide a more user-friendly experience for parents and students, we are here to help. Connect with our team to find out how!
