Ready to Stop Chasing Parents for Payment?

Collecting payments is one of the most challenging tasks for many small businesses. A recent survey done by Fundbox discovered that late payments have a large, negative affect on your small business.

Key results from the survey showed that due to late payments:

• 79% of small business owners couldn’t pay themselves on time
• 23% couldn’t hire new employees when needed
• 23% couldn’t invest in new equipment.

The results show that as a result of late payments, owners are struggling to pay themselves on time, and they are unable to grow their business. One way to help simplify the task of collecting payment is to move to accepting online payments. The easier that you make it for your customers to pay, the easier it is to manage collecting payments. We’ve recently added the ability to process online payments by credit card and ACH directly through Sandbox Software. Sandbox Payments enables child care centers to get paid faster and parents are loving the convenience.

“What are the fees?” “Are there any hidden fees?” These are questions that we hear quite often when discussing online payments with our customers. With Sandbox Payments, there are no monthly or hidden fees - only the standard merchant fees apply. The fees are as follows: Credit card is 2.9% +$0.30 per transaction and ACH payments are $0.60 per transaction. Although processing payments like this add additional costs, these costs are easily off-set by the time, effort and money saved from chasing down payments and from payments that are never collected. As an example of this, one of our Sandbox customers stated “To be honest, I spend so much time chasing payment, I would rather pay the $5 processing fee then spend countless hours chasing down a parent for the $100 they owe.” Many of our customers have also built the cost of processing online payments directly in it into their tuition fees, since charging a separate fee for accepting payment processing is frowned upon and is even illegal in some States and Provinces.

Sandbox Payments lets child care centers provide their customers (parents) with two options. The first option enables parents to select ‘Automatic Withdrawal’, allowing the center to charge them immediately when the parent is invoiced through Sandbox. This provides a worry-free process for the parents since their payments are processed automatically each billing period. Most child care centers love this option since they don’t have to wait for parents to pay their invoices manually.

The second option enables parents to view new invoices when they’re created, and pay them online through the Sandbox Parent Portal. This gives the parents control of when their card is charged, and gives them the flexibility of choosing how and when to pay.

Sandbox Payments integrates with Stripe, one of the largest merchants in North America and the set up process is quick and easy. After entering in your company information and your banking details (for where your money needs to be deposited), you can begin processing payments immediately. Parents can also log in to the Parent Portal immediately to add their payment methods, and enable “Automatic Withdrawal” or begin paying invoices manually.

Are you ready to start accepting payments electronically? Login and Start accepting payments in Sandbox today!