How School ERPs like Fedena have made online fee management a breeze,
and why it matters
For students who come from lower-income families, school fee payment can often be a draining endeavor. Interacting with bureaucrats, and the system itself can be a time consuming, humiliating and laborious experience for parents who are already worried about having to make difficult financial decisions to secure their child’s future.
Technology has been a boon in this regard. School ERP systems like Fedena allow parents to plan for their children’s fees in advance, set payment dates that work for them, receive receipt confirmation in a timely fashion. Being able to foresee such expenditures helps parents and administration ensure that their student’s focus remain on what is most important – learning to their full potential.
School ERPs are not just for the privileged few. One can argue that they are, in fact, even more, necessary for lower and middle-income schools. Fedena makes repetitive processes like fee collection more efficient for school administrators, and less anxiety-inducing for parents who might be struggling to plan their financial outlay for the school year. They make economic sense for schools – the financial and temporal expenditure made by the administration on fee collection is drastically reduced after a one-time investment in software like Fedena’s. Parents are able to plan for all contingencies, since Fedena allows for not just school fees, but also the hostel and transportation fees, library fines, and other miscellaneous instant fees to be easily collected.
Efficiency does not come at the cost of personalized attention with Fedena. Its software allows for individual fee particulars to be shared, instant discounts to applied, custom pay dates to be set, and fee receipts to be generated for every student. It enables easy fee refund whenever necessary, even allowing for recurring refund rules to be set by administrators at their discretion. The financial status of every student and parent can be considered while these decisions are being made without the added hassle of getting time-consuming approvals for administrative exceptions and override processes on a case-by-case basis.
Remember the gut-churning anxiety of having to remember to get your parents to sign off and give you a cheque or cash for that school trip you and your friends were excited for? Or how about the science kit your teacher was ordering for the class for that semester’s final project? Fedena allows for the collection of different types of fees through its software, instead of having to rely on students and teachers to manage the task. Payments can be made on-the-go at the convenience of the parent, and expenditures can be tracked through itemized details and easy receipt generation, letting children focus on actually learning from their museum visits and lab experiments.
With the demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes, our financial lives have dramatically changed. From how you pay your local grocer to how you manage recurring payments, our increasing reliance on electronic money transfer portals cannot be denied.
What does this mean for the education sector? What School ERPs have already been offering – better planning, increased transparency, and faster transactions. These are seen across the education sector with a decrease in capitation fees, and increased focus on equitable treatment based on merit.
What does this mean for individual schools and students? Whether it is financing a new library allowing students to quickly access the best material to support their learning, building better physical education facilities to produce the next PV Sindhu, or increasing support and salaries for teachers and staff, Fedena enables schools to focus on channeling funds and human resources towards bettering lives of the people who matter the most in the system – their students.
