Navigating Online Payment Challenges for Not-for-Profit and Educational Businesses

Not-for-Profit and educational organisations are swiftly embracing the shift to online payments, recognising the advantages it brings to their operations. This transition streamlines financial processes, offers greater convenience to customers, maintains data security, leads to faster payments, and improves cash flow. Accepting online payments is an essential service in a rapidly developing digitally sophisticated future.

Challenges from online payments

For Not-for-Profits and educational organisations, the transition to accepting online payments comes with a unique set of challenges. 

Complex Funding Sources:

Not-for-Profits and educational organisations often rely on diverse funding sources, including donations, grants, sponsorships, and tuition fees. Managing these multiple revenue streams while ensuring accurate tracking and allocation of funds can be challenging. Online payment systems must be versatile enough to accommodate various payment types and integrate seamlessly with ERP and reporting systems.

Compliance and Regulations:

Navigating the complex landscape of financial regulations and compliance standards is a concern for any business. Not-for-Profits and educational institutions face additional challenges due to their unique tax-exempt status. Ensuring that online payment processes align with relevant regulations, including those related to tax-deductible donations and data protection, requires careful attention.

Customisation and User Experience:

Not-for-Profits may need to facilitate different types of donations, including one-time gifts, recurring donations, and targeted campaigns. Ensuring that the online payment platform allows for customisation while maintaining a user-friendly experience is essential to encourage donor or customer engagement. Educational institutions require online payment systems tailored to accommodate many and varied offerings such as course fees, tuition plans, materials, as well as extra curricula activities like sports and coaching, camps, and even the uniform shop.

An institutions customer base will also bring its own challenges:

• Families with more than one child enrolled,
• Determining account responsibility and collection when an enrolled child’s parents are separated or divorced,
• Allocating short payments when both tuition and other activity fees are outstanding.

How can Kilimanjaro Consulting help you?

While the challenges of adopting online payment systems may seem daunting, your organisation can leverage the benefits of online payments to streamline operations, improve cash flow, and expand its reach. As technology continues to evolve, embracing online payments will become increasingly essential for Not-for-Profits and educational institutions to fulfil their missions and continue positively impacting society.

To help mitigate the challenges of online payments, consider a best-of-breed add-on solution, like ezyCollect, that can be integrated with MYOB Advanced and MYOB Exo. MYOB Advanced Education is a market-leading option to meet the enterprise-level accounting and financial reporting needs of education organisations.

ezyCollect’s SimplyPaid Portal mitigates online payment challenges

ezyCollect has developed the SimplyPaid online payment portal to solve your payment challenges. Using this portal, your customers can view and pay invoices online, from any location and at any time. SimplyPaid streamlines collections with a ‘Pay Now’ button embedded in invoices, statements, and even sales orders. Payments can be made via bank transfer or any credit card.  

This feature allows debtors to pay a selection of open invoices simultaneously and online. Payments are allocated automatically against the invoices in MYOB Advanced or MYOB Exo, in real-time, giving visibility of paid invoices immediately and saving you hours of manual effort.

When accessing the customer portal, parents can determine which invoice is due and how much they need to pay. ezyCollect allows a parent to query an invoice, log a dispute, or even explain why they are short paying an invoice. This functionality aids educational organisations in maintaining accurate records of paid invoices and automatically allocating the correct amounts, thereby streamlining the time-consuming reconciliation process.

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Direct Debits

SimplyPaid can also manage direct debit payments. The issues and control of Direct Debit approval is all handled within ezyCollect to make it a seamless process. Direct debits take your customer’s busy schedule out of the equation when making automatically scheduled payments. It can be a hassle-free option for both parties collecting the invoice based on due date with no manual intervention. Reducing Accounts Receivable roadblocks and giving your customer the opportunity to pay when they want, improves cash flow and creates a seamless payment experience. The easier it is to pay you, the quicker the funds roll in. An integrated system like ezyCollect, can extend the scope of your business management system and improve efficiency in your business.

Contact us to learn more about how Kilimanjaro Consulting and ezyCollect are working together to deliver tailor-made solutions in for NFP and Education organisations.

Watch the Webinar | How to improve cashflow and Accounts Receivable efficiency

Managing cashflow should be a top priority for any thriving business. Cashflow relies on getting paid on time and in full. Spending valuable time chasing overdue payments, fretting over client reliability, and posting and reconciling payments hinders potential growth.

Watch our webinar recording to discover how integrating innovative accounts receivable solutions can relieve your cashflow headache.

Call 1300 857 464 (AU) or 0800 436 774 (NZ), or email samacs@kilimanjaro-consulting.com for more information.