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RESEARCH FINDINGS
NACUBO Business Officer Survey Results:
e-Business Strategies
that Business Officers are Deploying
Right Now
At the post-conference session,
"Big Payoffs: Improving Bills and Billing Processes” of the NACUBO Student Financial
Services Conference early March in Memphis, RC Communications administered a survey on e-business strategies to the Business
Officers in attendance. Nearly 70% responded
- thank you! The group of respondents represented primarily smaller four year institutions (under 6,000 undergraduates) with
an even split between private and public schools.
Most business officers indicated they are either researching
alternatives or are in the initial stages of deploying their e-business services (51% combined). This is particularly true of
private institutions. A smaller group (29%) said they had already deployed key services, which tended to be the case among
public institutions. Driving this may be greater pressure on the public institutions to achieve cost efficiencies.
What e-business services are business officers planning to deploy?
The vast majority are looking to offer e-payments and e-billing of tuition and fees (79% and 69% respectively). Clearly
this is where the focus is among business officers today. However, a meaningful percentage also want to bring alumnae donations
and e-Refunds online (40% and 36% respectively), indicating the desire to consolidate the wide range of college-related fees and
charges to an online payment gateway.
Case Study
Hampshire College, a small, private, liberal arts institution in Amherst, Massachusetts, has offered online statements and
electronic bill payment options for over two years now. Their IT department developed an online billing application that
successfully interfaces with the Datatel student data system to generate electronically two major tuition and fees bills
annually, plus monthly bills for all other campus charges. Now, with the growing focus on
electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP), they are recognizing the
untapped cost savings they could realize if they actively marketed the online options, especially to parents who still
don’t use the system regularly. Many students have grown comfortable with viewing their statement online, and appreciate seeing
near real-time activity posted to their accounts. However, with 99% of tuition and fees paid by Hampshire College parents, the
challenge is to convert them to EBPP and get out of the paper billing business. Explains Student Accounts Manager,
Olivia Gendron, “We spend a half a day right now mailing out the bills, and that is time that could certainly be spent doing
other things. And with most statements as long as two pages, even three, that’s a lot of paper we could save.”
Whether you have an EBPP program up and running today, or are
looking to build one with the assistance of an outside provider, you will not realize the full potential of EBPP unless you
market the system aggressively to your student and parent populations. Until both parents and students are onboard
with online, you’ll still be spending hours preparing and mailing out those multi-page bills, which are not only expensive, but
are also likely to be outdated by the time they land in their mailboxes at home!
For more details on the e-business strategy survey,
click here
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