Education is the priority for any school district, but schools also provide services, such as collecting payments for fees and activities, and cashless schools are a new and powerful solution.
Cashless payment systems for schools offer many features and benefits that make them a good fit for school districts. Fast, convenient and secure payment services help students and parents stay on top of payments for all kinds of school fees and activities. School staff use automated posting, reconciliation, tracking and reporting features to clearly understand individual account status and overall revenue.
This comprehensive resource covers cashless payment systems — and how to become a cashless school — in detail. Keep reading to understand what, why and how these systems can help your school streamline the payment process for everyone.
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One of the significant priorities for school districts is managing cashless payments. The simple truth is that non-cash payments are rising in the United States, with overall non-cash transactions increasing more than 50% in the past decade. Cashless payments have many benefits for students: They can reduce the stigma associated with free or reduced lunches, ensure that parents never forget lunch, field trip or activity payments, and make notifying parents about pending payments or low balances easy.
These broader changes help explain why cashless payments have become the default payment method for many schools. A cashless default payment method means all families and students are automatically enrolled. Because it’s the default payment method, students are not given the "option" to enroll in cashless payments. Instead, they are given paperwork to fill out that will connect their school accounts with bank or credit card information. This makes cashless the default payment method.
The popularity of cashless payments is growing. According to McKinsey & Company research, the number of Americans using online payments with vendors (through browsers, apps, mobile phones and/or QR codes) and each other (through person-to-person payments) grew quickly in recent years:
These types of transactions are growing steadily. Why?
There are many reasons. Consider just a few national and global events and trends in recent years:
Schools are similar to many businesses and organizations that process payments. They want to provide their customers (parents and students) with faster and more convenient payment options. And school staff benefit from automated payment, reconciliation, tracking and reporting features that are built into these systems.
Safety is also an important issue. Any organization collecting payments must meet Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and card network card-not-present (CNP) guidelines to protect credit card information.
When communicating with students and parents, schools must consider anti-spam email rules that allow them to identify and control email solicitations and advertising from vendors.
And finally, schools have some unique programs and requirements to consider. For example, privacy rules outlined in the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that protect students’ and parents' personal information. And the National School Lunch Act (NSLA), which restricts access to records on students who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals.
A reputable and comprehensive online payment system can address these needs.
These seven steps explain how to become a cashless school in a planned and deliberate way.
Before we dive into optimizing your online process, let’s start with the basics. What are the benefits of online cashless payments? And how do you set yourself up to be a cashless school?
Tracking funds in school districts isn’t easy, especially when it’s not clear where fees are coming from and who is handling them. Some funds might need to be deposited into different accounts. Some payments might have been made in person at the front desk. It can be a real challenge to keep tabs on all this money, and you’re just setting yourself up to lose cash or checks.
school payment systems designed for K-12 school districts help streamline this process. They track who made a payment and where it should go. These solutions create cashless schools by allowing districts to set up multiple deposit accounts, pull reports and improve internal controls.
In addition to picking an online payment solution designed for your unique needs, here are some quick tips for tracking funds and setting your school up for success:
We already hinted at this in our fund-tracking tips above. There’s a trick to creating cashless schools in your district, and it’s a simple one:
Move every fee online.
That’s it. You’ll want to start slow and ease parents into the process. And it will take a bit of work. But once you begin transitioning payments to an online system, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it. Cashless schools can easily collect and track payments, saving staff the hassle of hunting down unpaid fees from students and spending time entering payments by hand.
Here are a few of the many fees you should move online:
Way to go! You moved all these fees online (or have a plan in place to gradually move fee types throughout the year). Now, the most important thing to do is focus on convenience for parents. After all, what’s the point of having a slick online payment process if it’s difficult to use?
We explain this step with four easy tips:
Make parents happy? Check. The next step to becoming a cashless school is getting buy-in from your team. It’s not enough to get your team on board when launching online payments, though. You need to make sure they’re happy with improvements and adjustments to the process going forward. Here’s a few ways you can win them over:
Online payments are often safer than taking cash or check payments in person, because there’s no risk of a credit card payment falling into a backpack black hole. But cashless schools do handle sensitive data and protecting that information must be taken seriously. If parents are uneasy about your system’s security, they’re not going to use it. Here are some security tips to help you out.
You put all your payments online. You got buy-in from your team. You’re sure you can keep payment information secure. You are heading down the path to become a cashless school. Now the question is, how do you make sure that people actually make payments online?
Over the last 20 years, we’ve found that convenience and speed matter the most to parents. They want a simple payment process they can complete from anywhere – at home on their computer or from their phone while sitting on the bleachers during basketball practice. But they can’t do that if they don’t know they have the option!
Here are a few ways you can promote your new online payment process:
The final step is to be consistent. Sending one newsletter with a direct link to your online payment system won’t get you to your cashless school goal. New students enter the district every year, which means you need to consistently tell parents about their online payment options. But don’t be discouraged if you don’t transition to a cashless school overnight. Keep at it! Starting slow and adding fee types as you go, along with consistent promotion, will help you successfully grow online payments.
Understanding what a cashless school is and the key features and benefits are important parts of assessing these systems. To make a cashless school a reality, you also need to understand the implementation process, and put your plans into action.
To do this, it will help to have some expert guidance on how to select a system. We’ve gathered 18 tips to help you choose a cashless payment system for school. Keep reading for guidance!
Before you start shopping around for school payment software, identify your district’s goals. Do you want to move all student payments online as soon as possible? Or would you prefer to roll out just a few required fees before adding more in the future?
Knowing this will help you create a list of questions to ask payment vendors you consider. Make sure you have a clear goal in mind when searching for your district’s perfect payment partner.
This one might seem obvious, but cost is one of the biggest factors in finding the right school payment software for your district. Your district will need to compare your budget with the cost of your ideal system to make this decision.
And it’s not just ongoing costs you need to consider. Keep in mind factors such as start-up costs or add-on fees. Use your payment goals to help find a solution that meets your needs and your budget.
Think about the many types of fees your district collects during the school year beyond required registration and classroom payments. Once you get going, you might be surprised at how many there are, such as:
Unless your district only plans to move required fees online, you’ll need a service that can handle all these fees and more. Make a list of every fee you collect, then make sure your school payment software can handle them all.
Don’t leave the cashless school payment software decision to individual schools in your district. You’ll end up with a chaotic blend of different systems. That means reconciling funds at a district level will be a nightmare.
Instead, pick one solution for the entire district. This will ensure funds collected by your schools are coming through the same place and end up where they need to be. Plus, parents won’t need to use multiple systems for classroom payments, food balances and extracurricular fees. And staff members won’t need to learn a variety of different ways to collect, track and reconcile payments.
The prospect of ditching cash and checks for good is exciting! Your staff likely can’t wait to get started. But no matter how ready everybody is to rally behind a new school payment software, you need to have a realistic launch timeline to ensure its success.
First, establish how soon you want to implement the system. If you’re right in the middle of a busy season – such as fall registration – you might not be able to realistically roll it out until that’s calmed down.
Next, find out how long it will take to set up the new system. If the provider offers setup support, a quick launch might be possible. If not – and your district doesn’t have a dedicated software expert on board – the rollout might not be quite so smooth.
The goal of moving student payments online is to reduce cash, checks, paperwork and the manual work it takes to process them. In other words, you don’t want to create more work for staff or parents.
To do this successfully, you need to make it as convenient as possible for parents to use your school payment solutions. That means allowing them to pay the way they want. Make sure your online payment system accepts multiple payment types, including major credit cards and eChecks.
Your district already has school software in place – your student information system, cafeteria management software or even enrollment software. Rather than adding a whole new system to the mix, choose a school payment software that seamlessly works together with your existing software.
Search for the school payment software that integrates with your school information system (SIS). And check to see if the provider https://www.vancopayments.com/educationffers any cafeteria management options. Pairing student payment processing with these management tools makes it easy to collect and reconcile payments in one place.
As your district begins accepting online payments for more – if not all – student fees, you need to make sure security is a top priority. After all, you’ll be handling sensitive card and bank account information, and your school payment software will be responsible for keeping that data safe.
Fortunately, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) has established standards that processors must meet to maintain a secure environment for cardholders. When searching for an online payment processor, we recommend looking for one with the highest level of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Learn more about Level 1 PCI processing standards.
Successfully rolling out new cashless school payment software requires staff to be on board. And one of the quickest ways to get staff to support the new process is by educating them about it. To do this, your payment processor will need to offer training.
The next question is, of course, whether that training is provided for free or at an additional cost. If there’s a cost to train staff, you’ll have to weigh whether it's worth the extra price.
Ideally, nearly everyone in your district will use your new school payment software. But to have that many users, you need to have different user levels. Check to see whether schools in your district can control user permissions in your payment software, or if they need to be set at the district level.
Make sure you can set the right controls to meet your needs. If there are only two types of user permissions – edit and view – that could be an issue for teachers interacting with the same areas as finance staff.
If you’re serious about reducing cash and checks (and we think you are!), you must offer parents a fast, straightforward online payment process. We all know that if it takes more than two minutes for parents to figure out how to make a single payment, they’re going to get frustrated and abandon it.
To avoid that, here are a few questions to ask about the parent side of cashless school payment processing:
Remember: Some parents require a bit more hand-holding than others, and staff time is limited. These answers will help you determine how easy it’ll be for parents to use the school payment software and how much work it will be for staff to walk them through it.
Parents need a simple way to add money to school lunch accounts, pay for field trip fees and more, anytime and anywhere. That means paying from their smartphones, tablets or laptops at any time. Make sure your school software has a mobile-responsive design that accommodates on-the-go payments. The ideal school payment software will be user-friendly from any device and available 24/7.
If you set up multiple deposit accounts, your district can rest assured funds are going to the correct location. Automating this process means fewer people need to handle the money, which leads to fewer errors and hours of time saved. Streamlining tracking and deposits also increases transparency between departments. It’s a real win-win.
Find out if you can deposit into multiple bank accounts with the school payment software and how long it will take deposits to arrive in your bank accounts.
If you don’t already know what reports your staff needs, now is the time to find out. Talk with departments in your district to find out what type of reporting you’ll need (or want) from your cashless school payment software. Then, ask the online payment processor these questions:
Comprehensive reporting tools could be enough to nudge your district toward a particular payment provider.
You know how important it is to keep parents happy. And the best way to do that is to make things easy for them – like letting them pay student fees online. You’re already looking for a provider to do that, but you can take it a step further with an online store. Look for a school payment software that includes a customizable online store, and ask about these options:
There are plenty of online payment processors out there – looking at you, PayPal or Square – that would work for some of your fees. But they’re simply not built for K-12 districts. Don’t settle for a processor that isn’t designed to handle your district’s unique funding needs.
Instead, choose a payment provider that specializes in schools and understands what districts like yours need. For example, time-saving features including fast reconciliation and easy refunds are important for schools. Find out how long the school payment software provider has served schools, and what features they offer to support schools’ specific needs.
You now have a list of questions to ask and topics to cover when vetting school payment software. But what’s even better than hearing from the payment provider? Hearing from their customers!
Some companies have testimonials or reviews right on their website, while others have them available by request. Ask for them! Then, find out if any schools in your area are using their school payment software and ask:
Our tips so far have focused on connecting you with the right school payment software. After all, that’s your goal: Eliminating cash and checks by accepting fees online. But this final recommendation is to think beyond payments when searching for the perfect partner. Do you want to:
You’re making a huge decision for your district, so it’s OK to be picky. When choosing the ideal school payment software, think about the features that could save your staff the most time and reduce friction for parents.
The right school payment software for your district is out there. At Vanco, we’ve helped more than 1,300 districts across the U.S. save time by processing every student fee online. Our custom Web Store simplifies fee payments and streamlines reconciliation in a way other school finance software simply doesn't.
Let parents, students and staff enjoy hassle-free online payments. Make events a cinch and boost fundraising with easy-to-use, built-in capabilities. Take seven minutes to watch how Vanco’s cashless school software makes it easy to track and reconcile any payment from one central hub!
Supercharge your school's financial planning with our free K-12 school budget example and template, which we designed to save you countless hours.