Improved Tuition Management with ACH in Online Express Bill Pay!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the decision we made to add online bill payment to The Education Edge.  When we investigated online bill payment, I had many conversations with schools about tuition management. The most obvious benefit to tuition management was to move bill payments from in person transactions to online. Our team went to work and made it happen with the 7.85 release.

However, our story did not end there. When we continued our conversations with schools about tuition management, we really talked about how important the cash flow is each month for your school. And even though online bill payment makes it easier and faster to get paid, credit card fees for online payments can mean cash flows take a hit. For most schools, you told us that your credit card fees are significantly higher than fees for online checks. When school budgets are already tight, we heard you when you said, we need more options.


Many months ago when we settled in to work on Online Express Bill Pay, we also reached out to our Shared Services team at Blackbaud and said we love our Blackbaud Merchant Services and Blackbaud Payment Service products, but we also need you to improve them by adding the ability for people to pay student bills with ACH, otherwise known as online checks.


After some negotiations on timing with their own release, we worked out a solution on when we could deliver ACH. I’m proud to say the coordinated effort paid off and today we are happy to announce that for hosted and install customers, you can now accept online checks in Online Express Bill Pay!

TIP: Do you want to learn about our fees for credit cards and online checks in Blackbaud Merchant Services? Contact your Blackbaud Account Sales Representative today!

The next time you log in to The Education Edge and navigate to Online Express Bill Pay, you will be prompted to install the update and restart the program. Once you restart and go back to Bill Pay, you will now see the option to add online checks in your bill pay form set up.

Each day, I’m thankful that we have our vocal users who tell us what you need to make our solutions valuable to you. I hope you know we’re listening and will continue to listen.

Do you want to be a part of what we're working on next? Join us in our product discovery efforts!