View from the classroom
How did you decide on your chosen solution?
After conducting research we settled on WisePay. The WisePay services we have introduced include Pre-Ordering for Meals, Trip Management and Payments and General cashless payments. WisePay was selected because all of its services fully integrate with our Management Information System.
The WisePay Pre-Ordering for Meals service was selected to deal with the increased number of meals we were anticipating per day and to meet the need for a more convenient payment method for parents.
Trips and other payments were also becoming difficult to manage. We pride ourselves on running a large number of trips for our children, but need to show the associated income so each can be budgeted accordingly. Being able to print off a ‘real-time’ list of transactions has all but eradicated any discrepancies over whether payments have been made by parents or not.
How easy was it to set up?
The set-up process was very easy to manage thanks to the system’s integration with our Management Information System (MIS). WisePay pulls pupil data from the MIS, so I don’t have to enter all the data afresh. I can then use WisePay to determine audience groups for different trip/activity/meal options, for example, specifying that only Key Stage 2 children are eligible for a certain sports club.
I deliberately phased in the modules over a five- month period to give parents time to get used to it. We started with trips, then music payments and finally we rolled out the meal payments to coincide with the introduction of UIFSM.
How has going cashless benefited the school?
I can now interrogate payments in fine detail to get a real time picture of what the income is, rather than wait for cheques to clear or a bank run to be made, which took my admin staff away from their primary functions. Being able to print off a ‘real-time’ list of transactions has all but eradicated any discrepancies over whether payments have been made by parents or not.
How have parents reacted to the change? Online payments have modernised the school and parents can now make payments from the comfort of their own homes at their own convenience. We have included simple step-by- step instruction on the St Michael’s website which includes a link to the WisePay site. This makes it easy for parents who are unfamiliar with internet banking and other forms of online payment to use WisePay. The WisePay website itself is also simply laid out and guides parents through using the service. This has encouraged parents to pay more promptly and also demonstrated our commitment to keeping up with current trends across Bournemouth schools.
How have staff responded to the change? The administration time in meal ordering has been reduced dramatically now that parents are responsible for making sure they are ordering the correct meals for their children. Combined with a reduced amount of time to reconcile cash and cheques and less need to complete banking runs, switching to WisePay has saved approximately 15 hours a week for my administration staff, which equals 24 days a year. The time taken to process the school meal payments and prepare the order for the catering company has reduced from two days to 15 minutes, because all the meal selections and financial information is already populated online.
The time freed up has been repurposed towards other pressing office tasks and dealing with requests from parents, leading to improved interaction between parents and the school. The administration time for processing trip payments has also been drastically reduced. Previously, it would take an hour from the payment being handed in to it being completely processed - an hour which is now freed up for other tasks. We run approximately 108 trips per year, which means that per year we are saving three weeks of staff time.
WisePay’s solutions have proved very reliable and are flexible enough to meet fluctuating demands throughout the school year. The support we have received from WisePay has always been useful and I have had very positive feedback from my team.
I cannot think of a more efficient way to manage payments than using WisePay’s services; they have accommodated all our needs and we now have a system which is more efficient for staff and more convenient for parents.
www.stmichaelsprimary.bournemouth.sch.uk January 2016
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