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E-BILLING
More Than Just Design - How to
Construct a Bill that Works
While creating a well-designed bill is an
important step, what business officers are
equally challenged by is how to present
accurate, comprehensive and timely data on the
bill from all data sources. “We are at the mercy
of the offices that put information on the
tuition and fees bill,” explains Virginia
Layton, Bursar at Miami University in Ohio. “We
can’t control when financial aid is going to
report their figures; if it is right after we
issue a bill, this can be confusing for the
student.” Even when properly organized, a bill
that presents information on financial aid, the
monthly payment plan, the registrar’s office,
and various fees can be difficult to deliver
with timeliness and accuracy.
Bruce Boyer, CFO of Columbia College, plans to
re-design the College’s paper and e-bill, but is
waiting for the new SQL server and latest
release of the ERP system first. Not one to sit
on the sidelines, for over two years, Boyer has
worked in close partnership with the provider of
the school’s monthly payment plan and EBPP
module. They have recently established a way to
extract data from multiple systems (financial
aid, registrar and tuition) and present
all of it in near real time through the EBPP
module. “We present a flat text version of the
bill data on the EBPP module, which may not be
pretty, but it is accurate and clear. This gives
it credibility,” Boyer explains. “Early in the
semester, thirty or forty students printed out
the text page from the EBPP module, walked in to
the Bursar’s office with it, and paid the
balance off right there.” The result of
presenting clear, real-time financial aid and
tuition information on an electronic bill:
Increased collections rates. Plain and simple.
While some business officers are working their
ERP and EBPP providers to deliver the billing
solutions they need, others are still searching
to find a simple path to delivering a
comprehensive bill that provides an attractive,
clear communication to students and parents that
gets the bill paid. The solution does exist: be
it middleware that is an add-on function to the
data extraction process or a functionality
integrated seamlessly into the vendor’s
solution. Ask your data and billing partners how
they will accomplish this process for you:
This middleware functionality allows you to
download data, organize it, and populate a
pre-designed bill template that delivers a
clear, yet comprehensive communication to your
students and parents. The bill design templates
are modular, so you can pick and choose among
various fonts, data placement, and organization.
Ask your billing vendor how you can apply the
best practices techniques found in the
accompanying article on Top 10 Best Practices in
Bill Organization and Design, and watch your
collections rates rise. |
