Why We Developed Online Express Bill Pay for Student Billing

How do you know what to build next?  Is it a science or an art?  I think it is a little bit of both.  I joined our team as a Product Manager in September of last year and was faced with exactly this question.  We’ve got an amazing community of users that have given us fantastic feedback and I was able to utilize this information to guide where to focus our energies next.  One of the main areas I recognized was feedback around our online experience and the need for parents to have the ability to pay online rather than come in with a check/cash or call with a credit card.  As a team we recognized, whoa!  There it is, online bill payment!!  Easy, let’s just do it!  So we did!

We started off with discovery in October and worked with about 7 different organizations and 18 individuals across those organizations to make sure we understood exactly what was needed.  As we went through, some of the most consistent feedback we received was around why this was needed:

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• Time Savings:  no longer having to hand key individual payments
  
• Secure Payment Processing:  not having to worry about a credit card number written on a piece of paper to be processed
  
• Easy to Setup/Maintain:  no longer worrying about keeping up with forms across multiple sites to improve the parents paying experience
  

So keeping all of this in mind, we looked at our solutions and said what do we need?  First, we needed to determine where this type of form would live initially.  Looking at our options, we identified NetClassroom as the right location for a payment form as we are able to display the statement online through NetClassroom already.  Second, we needed an easy to use form builder that didn’t require a lot of effort.  Thirdly, we needed to make sure that there was simple process of managing the payments in Student Billing and accommodate the different configurations a school could employ in their database – student or payer-centric.  We’ve worked to create a simple tool that schools can employ to offer their parents the option to pay online without having to utilize external systems or export/import into and out of Student Billing.

We also identified areas we would like to work on in the future to continue to improve the online payment experience for our payers.  We are excited to learn after our first release about what parents would like to see on the form for easier use. Then, for our schools, we are investigating opportunities to improve reconciliation processes and work to provide more automation to those efforts.

I am so excited for the release of Online Express Bill Pay and for our schools to leverage this new tool to offer online payment options that integrate directly to their database.