News & Updates

How To Track Outstanding Payments

By Paolo Dona — Nov 11, 2011

Many schools allow their students to pay in multiple instalments.

Requiring students to pay the full course upfront is safer for the school, but it is not always applicable.

For example students who enroll in long courses, or students who apply for a Visa might not be able to pay the full amount upfront, and prefer to split the payment in multiple smaller payments over time.

As a school manager, you want to make sure all outstanding payments are tracked correctly and are not forgotten.

NiftySchool can help you do exactly that thanks to its outstanding payments feature.

1. Mark payments as ‘outstanding’

When recording a payment, you can mark it as ‘outstanding’. Use the options at the bottom of the payment form to mark a payment as paid or outstanding.

You can quickly schedule a future payment by setting the payment date field to a date in the future.

Once you have marked a payment as outstanding, it will appear in its own section in the student’s file.

This helps you quickly identify which payments have been made and which ones are still pending.

Also a split total will help you work out how much money is still due.

Every outstanding payment will be marked with a yellow warning sign on the right hand side.

If you move your mouse over the warning icon, a popup will give you details about the outstanding payment. For example it will tell you if the payment is due in the future or if it’s overdue (in which case, you may want to notify the student).

2. Check all of your outstanding payments

Seeing the outstanding payments in the student’s file is useful when the student is in front of you at the reception desk.

In order to process all of the outstanding payments, though, you would need a single place in which they’re all listed regardless of the students involved.

This can be done from the general Payments tab; Click on the ‘change filter’ link by the payment dates to open the search box.

You can specify if you want only paid payments, only outstanding ones or all of them.

The date filters allow you to differentiate overdue payments (date in the past) from future instalments.

All of the filtered results can always be downloaded in Excel format, by clicking on the ‘download .xls’ link.

3. Get notified when payments are due

Now that all of your outstanding payments are nicely recorded into the system, you need to make sure you don’t forget about them.

NiftySchool helps you with alerts that are automatically generated and shown in your dashboard and Alerts section at the right time.

There are four different types of alerts related to payments:

Due payments:

An alert is shown a week before an outstanding payment is due (based on the payment date).

For example, if a payment is due on October 15th, you will be notified on October 8th.

Overdue payments:

An additional alert is shown on the payment date, if still outstanding.

Expiring payments:

An alert is shown when the period covered by a payment is coming to an end (a week before the end date).

If you have a payment covering from Oct 15th to Dec 15th, you will be notified on Dec 8th, so that you don’t forget to make arrangements for the next payment.

Expired payments:

An alert is shown after the period covered by a payment has come to an end. E.g.: after Dec 15th, following the previous example.

So to recap: ‘Due’ and ‘Overdue’ payment alerts are based on the payment due date, whilst ‘Expiring’ and ‘Expired’ payment alerts are based on the end date of a payment period.

You can decide which alerts you want to receive from the Configuration/Alerts section.

By default they are all switched on, but you can turn them off if you find there are too many of them (when payments are concerned we think it’s better to be notified than risking to forget something).

You can learn more about the alerts system watching this brief video tutorial

Conclusions:

By correctly tracking outstanding payments and using NiftySchool’s built-in alerts system, you can make sure no payment slips through the net, and you can be automatically notified when new instalments are due.

We hope you enjoy this feature. If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!