Private Funds
Manager
Online Payments
Online Payments refers to processing of paying on the internet through a secure payment portal, for goods or services. In schools this could be uniform, dinner money, trips, performances and so on. A parent or other adult accesses an appropriate web site, identifies themselves and the pupil in some unique way, selects the items to pay for, and then uses a credit card, debit card or online account to make the payment.
There are literally hundreds (probably thousands) of organisations that offer the facility for online payments. Some are very general, well known and used by millions such as Paypal (as used by eBay and many others); some are absolutely specific to schools such as ParentPay; and there are many in between that have a little or a lot of school-based functionality.
At this moment, Istek have decided that there are so many of these established organisations already offering online payments , that linking with them is the best option for schools rather than producing our own version and requiring schools to use this in order to link with PFM. The requirement from the online system is simply that a report can be produced ideally in Excel format that specifies a student identifier (ideally admission number or UPN number, but name can be used); a trip/account identifier; a date; amount; and a unique payment number. To date, all systems encountered are able to offer this.
Private Funds Manager then uses an import procedure as detailed below to bring the transactions automatically in be there 5 or 500 rather than having to key these in manually. It is clearly a tremendous time saver for finance administration staff if the take up of the online system adequate.
Currently we have schools using the automatic import procedure for the following online systems:
Parentmail +pay, ParentPay, WisePay, sQuidCard, Payments4Schools, Solihull e-pay, Individual systems written by schools to their specific requirements . (Click here for detailed instructions for each system)
There is no additional charge for using the automatic link in PFM it is part of the standard installation and no additional support charge..