Fees management software that enhancing the entire payment process in a school from admission to graduation. Fees related to students and staff wages/ salary payment.
What is fees management software?
Fees management software is a tool, platform, or application that helps educational institutions like schools and colleges plan and manage all of their fee payment-related processes. A good fee management software manages the end to end fee payment cycle – from the calculation of fees, accounting for additions and deductions, fee due notice, fee payment portals, and fee receipt generation.
Fee management software ensures that the process of fee payment for parents and fee collection for management remains a safe, secure, and hassle-free experience. It also ensures that an ongoing record is remain maintained for the administration of all these sensitive financial transactions.
Read: How to Chose Suitable School Software for your School
Why do we need school fees management software?
Fee generation and payment is an essential process for any educational institution since it concerns itself with the bottom line. School Fees management software automates and digitizes this entire process, making it less prone to human error and also ensuring that it occurs seamlessly for parents and management. Parents benefit from the implementation of a fees management software because they are sent timely reminders to complete the fee payment and can make the payment from anywhere at any time and from any device. For management, automating the process reduces the error rate and ensures that fee payment becomes a hassle-free process in terms of collection and generation of receipt, while also reducing labor costs, thanks to lowered dependency on the accounts team at their educational institution.
What are the top hidden features of School Accounting Management System?
Robust school accounting management software like School Software Pro automates the entire fee process for parents and school management. They virtually automate and digitize existing processes to reduce time and labor burden on the educational institution. But there are also many hidden features that might not be as intuitive as the pen and paper process, but enhance the fee process to be more useful to stakeholders.
Below we have discussed some of these features:
• Multiple Accounts
Online school accounting system gives users the ability to group fees into different account heads. This is done to ease the process of accounting. For instance, let us say that a specific department collects multiple types of fee – like the recreation department collects both arts and crafts related fees as well as sports fees.
The fees management software will enable users to see these fees individually but also group, if necessary. It does not just stop with the maintenance and delineation of records in this way. Fee reports also give users the option to filter accounts under this, making it an end to end experience for users wishing to study financial reports.
• Fee Receipt Sets
Fee receipts are an essential final step of any fee payment process that indicates the closing of the fee payment process. These receipts are necessary as a signifier, but also vital for parents paying the fees for their financial records. In many instances, since students are on differing fee bands, participating in different activities that accrue additional charges, or perhaps responsible for paying fines, the receipts have to be individually designed and generated.
However, with robust school accounting system, users can group different fees based on the accounts they fall under, to different receipt sequences and header designs. This ultimately results in dedicated fee receipts, fee receipt generation processes, and customized designs for specific needs. This kind of customization would initially be very time and labor-intensive using a traditional pen and paper process, but thanks to fees management software, it becomes much more comfortable and less time consuming to generate such receipts.
Financial Year
Fees generation and payment are not a standalone feature of educational institutions. They are part of a much larger entity that reflects the financial health of the school. This is why many schools and colleges nowadays rely on the efficiency and error-free character of a fees management software to organize and maintain fee-related records. When approaching the fees process holistically, it has noticed that they are part and parcel of how the financial year pans out for an educational institution like a school or a college.
For instance, a newly debuting financial year provides a logical division for each year’s reports. When maintaining the fee records following the same timeline and logic, then fees become an integral part of the financial reports that are generated by the fees management system. So next time you set up a fee process, create a financial year before configuring the fees to dovetail with the same.
Read: Reasons how school ERP system is compulsory in your institutes
• Master Particulars:
Avoid confusion and complexity while dealing with different fee categories. This feature allows creating distinctive Master Particulars to use them under different fee categories. Link the existing fee categories to the Master Particulars created, to use them in the further transaction processes.
• Master Discounts:
Fee generation and payment is a highly rules-driven process, making it an ideal process that needs to be automated and digitized. Accounting management software is particularly adept at this. However, despite this process being so rules-driven, there are always multiple customized exceptions – an example of this is deductions or discounts in the fee-based on every individual student’s requirements.
Such discounts can range from awarded scholarships to waivers need-based exceptions or adjustments against other payments. All these discounts can be highly individualistic and vary from time to time and student to student. It is thus necessary the schools must have an exhaustive list of all the discounts.
In school accounting management software, such a list would be called Master Discounts. Master Discounts is a distinctive category that lists all the discounts that apply under different fee categories. When generating a fee, implement existing discounts by linking them to the Master Discounts to avoid the complexity and confusion involved in doing granular transactions. Having such a Master Discounts list reduces errors and missteps when generating the fees due for any students.
Read: Important notification in your School Management Software you need to know
• Multiple Receipt Number:
Fee receipt generation is an essential step of the fee process and as any finance team member will tell you – the most cumbersome one since it requires a high level of precision. Sometimes it is prone to human error, or things slip through the cracks, resulting in time and labor overload for both management in an educational institution as well as parents. At the same time, fee receipts are highly sensitive documents that require a high level of accuracy also.
So how can one efficiently generate multiple receipts, maintain clear records of the same, and still maintain high accuracy and a low error rate?
Fees management software is perfect for the job. It is especially the case for the mass generation of receipts for entire classes, departments, or account groups. The fees management software can easily handle the load but also maintain records by generating specific receipt numbers for each collection in the transaction when related fees have applied for all students in a given account or department or group. It means that while the fees are the same and get collected in a group, individual records are maintained ensuring all financial records remain accurate and clean.