For Treasurers

Features

  • Easy credit card payment and, if needed, refunds
  • Optionally set a default tuition price
  • Set whether you ever accept a certain payment type
    • For each payment method (Credit Card, Checks, Cash, Scholarships/Vouchers) you can specify whether or not you offer it as an option.  So, if you make a policy that you will never accept PayPal, then just turn that option off and you’ll never see PayPal as an payment option when setting up a new class.
    • Alternatively, if, say, PayPal is an an allowed option, you can still choose to offer it for a particular class, or not offer it – the choice is yours.
  • Add extra, custom instructions for checks and cash payments
    • Give custom instruction on how to handle payments, like “Drop them off at the front office and put butler-jse-123 on the memo line.”  You can accept our default setting or make your own, including merged fields.
    • Parents need to know where to send things, so you need a way to tell them.  Adding custom fields, like a booking id, can make the instructions feel personal and make them more likely to be followed, making it easier for you.  We’ve seen checks without any indication of which kid or class the check is for.We’ve seen checks be sent to teachers, principals, after-care, etc., which somebody would need to hunt down.   This features attempts to minimize the hunt.

Money-Saving OpportunitiesMaddie counting money 2015-06-08 07.03.11

  • On-line course catalog limits printing costs
    • Some schools create a nice paper course catalog for the parents. These catalogs sometimes run several pages long and take many hours to produce.  One School Twist school was spending > $900 to print and distribute their catalog.  Our online version offers a good experience for the parents, allowing for color photos, videos, longer descriptions, and filter on grade or day-of-week.  Most school continue to distribute a one-page overview flyer, much cheaper than a whole pamphlet.
  • Saving time can save wages
    • Although not common, large programs simply find they they can’t find volunteers to step up to all the labor involved in running registration.  These schools typically end up paying one of the parents for their time.  Since using School Twist saves labor, it becomes more reasonable for volunteers to run run the program for free.  If you still pay people for their time, you’ll at least get away with fewer hours.  One new School Twist school used to spend 80 hours a year just collecting forms and payments through their home-made Google Forms and PayPal set-up.

Pricing

For every credit card transaction, we collect up to $3, and provide free refunds and cancellations. You can see all of the details on the pricing page, but frankly, there isn’t much to see there.

Keep in mind that there still might be merchant fees (the credit card and PayPal process fees that they charge everyone) associated with your transaction.  All in all, on a $100 class, you will see about $94 show up in your bank account.

What will I need to do to use credit cards?

After you register for an account, you’ll need to link your School Twist site to Stripe.com.  Stripe is our credit processing company and they are used by lots of companies such as Lyft, Kickstarter, and Pinterest.  You can set up an account for free and can start collecting credit card payments within minutes. But you’ll need to eventually tell them about your bank so that they can disburse funds into your account.

How does School Twist collect money?

We collect our fee during the payment process, just like the credit card companies do, so you and your parents will never see the payment directly.  In other words, if you list a class for $100 dollars, and the parent registers to pay by credit card, Stripe will take about $3, for themselves, to process the transaction.  Stripe will then also take the $3 School Twist fee and deposit that $3 into School Twist’s account.  Stripe will then take the remaining $95 and deposit into your PTO’s Stripe account.

Finance Reports

  • Excel: Everything is exportable to Excel
  • At-a-Glance missing payment details

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