RECURRING INVOICES OR NAH🤷‍♂️?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been helping one of our clients select from one of two popular child care management software packages. I attended video meetings with her as she met with the onboarding representatives from both platforms eager to have her business.

I put together the family data for her to upload into their system and I went through the motions of listening to the onboarding specialists; trying to gather key information that may have changed since I helped with the last implementations of these platforms.  

The Executive Director of the non-for-profit is excited about selecting one of these platforms because it has an associated curriculum. However, I'm not so optimistic that her current staff will adapt well to it. From my observation, they are doing well with handing out daily telegrams on paper and I feel doubtful that they will be consistent in sending out daily reports.

The billing features of these platforms are explained as simple, but the Executive Director seemed to struggle a little bit when it came to setting up billing plans in a test environment. She wants payments to automatically come out of parent's accounts but a very high percentage of her client base receives subsidy and their cash flow is not always predictable. Also, many of her clients don't have bank accounts. From what I can tell, 99% of her customers use debit cards to pay their tuition and co-pays.

I was also concerned about her taking on this kind of billing system because she does not have a technical staff available to manage family data and the systems don't have an API (Application Programming Interface) that would allow them to talk to and share information with other systems to automatically update family data.

I asked the hypothetical question as to what would happen if someone wants to make a payment on the spot?  What if they pay with cash? Who would record the transaction? Although I am positive on using technology because I am a technologist, I don't feel like the billing features of the systems that she was considering would be right for her center.  In fact, she had tried one such popular system before. When I asked her why she hadn't continued using it, she said she got tired and didn't have anyone to help her keep up with it.

The concept of recurring payments is great if you serve a population that can have their payment available on a card or in an account reliably on a specified day AND you have someone to operate they system to administer these payments and keep family data in sync.  If you don't have both of these elements available, you may want to consider using one of these systems for their curriculum features only and using a different payment system for your center.


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